Lines, tokens and money brokers: Myanmar’s crumbling economy runs low on cash

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Myanmar central bank, now run by junta, has not returned some of the reserves it holds for private banks, leaving the banks short of cash

This translation has been automatically generated and has not been verified for accuracy.If you need cash in Myanmar, you have to get up early. Queues start forming outside banks at 4 a.m., where the first 15 or 30 customers are given a plastic token that will allow them to enter the bank when it opens at 9:30 a.m. and withdraw cash, according to more than a dozen people who spoke to Reuters.

“It’s now very difficult to operate a business,” said Hnin Hnin, an entrepreneur in her mid-20s who supplies shampoo and bedsheets to high-end hotels. “Traders don’t accept bank transfers now. They want cash. So we need to find the cash.” It is now almost impossible to get hold of U.S. dollars or other overseas currency at regular exchange centres in Yangon, a dozen people told Reuters. Black-market traders will take online transfers in exchange for physical notes in various currencies, they said, but add a commission of up to 10 per cent.

Financial research firm Fitch Solutions said in April it expected Myanmar’s gross domestic product to shrink 20 per cent in 2021.The United Nations Development Programme said last month that Myanmar faces economic collapse due to the combined effect of the new coronavirus and the coup, which in its worst-case analysis could put nearly half the country’s 54 million people into poverty, compared to about a quarter in 2017.

In Yangon, the country’s commercial capital, an egg and cooking oil trader who identified herself as Khin told Reuters the flow of eggs, oil and other agricultural commodities had slowed substantially and was no longer sufficient, forcing her to raise prices by 25 per cent.

 

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