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VietNamNet Bridge – The dollar price keeps sliding, VND is short, banks refuse to buy dollar, these are the main features of the monetary market at the current moment.
On the afternoon of March 3, we came to Thanh Cong Branch of Vietcombank in Hanoi and said we wanted to sell dollars, but the officers here refused to buy. Many other people there, who also brought in dollars to sell, had to bring dollars back home. Some of them said that they had come to several other banks before going there, but still could not sell dollars.
Linh, one of the people, related that she was trying to sell a big volume of dollars to get VND for other investment deals, but all the banks said they did not have any demand for dollars. “I’m losing tens of millions of VND a day due to the dollar price slide,” Linh said.
A reader in HCM City wrote to VietNamNet that on February 28, he came to Phuong Nam Bank to take back the matured deposit worth $10,000. The client suggested sell the $10,000 to the bank to get VND, but the bank’s officer said that the bank did not need more dollars, and that if the client really wanted to sell dollars, the bank could help make transactions with the brokerage fee of 2%.
The problem with selling the dollar began several days ago, when the dollar price was sliding on the black market, while the gold price was skyrocketing. A lot of people, who have been frightened by the dollar value decrease, have decided to sell dollars to buy gold for hoarding.
Nguyen Thanh Truc, Director of Agribank’s Gold and Silver Company, said that sometimes the company’s transaction offices have to refuse to buy dollars from individual clients.
Sounds like a trend that could catch on in the region
