Photo: Yonhap News
South Korea and the United States have agreed to extend a 60 billion dollar bilateral currency swap deal by six months in an effort to help ease market uncertainties amid the ongoing pandemic.
The Bank of Korea issued a statement Thursday saying although the U.S. dollar and Korea's foreign exchange markets have recently shown stabilizing movements, uncertainty sparked by the virus outbreak still lingers, so they agreed to extend the swap agreement.
The bank said that when needed, it will provide dollar-denominated loans to local banks via bidding by tapping the currency swap line.
It has already supplied a combined 19.87 billion dollars to banks by using the arrangement between March and May.
The BOK and the U.S. Federal Reserve signed the currency swap facility in March, and it was initially set to end on September 30 but will be extended until March 31, 2021.
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