Dhaka: Bangladesh Bank (BB) will announce the half-yearly Monetary Policy Statement (MPS) for the second half of the current 2015-16 financial year (FY16) next week.

‘We are going to launch a new monetary policy by mid
January’, said BB Chief Economist Biru Paksha Paul on Thursday.

He said the monetary policy is being prepared to give special importance on various sectors to help accelerate growth and investment.

‘The central bank is also reviewing the challenges that the MPS should address in managing inflation while driving the economy towards achieving higher growth’, Paul said.

The central bank on July 30 last year unveiled the MPS for the first half of the FY16 when Governor Dr Atiur Rahman made it clear that the MPS would pursue cautious stance in credit expansion to keep inflation at a comfortable level.

In the MPS, the central bank projected 15.0 per cent credit growth to private sector while the overall domestic credit growth was targeted at 16.3 per cent. The projections were higher than the preceding year’s actual domestic credit growth of 10.4 per cent and private sector credit growth of 13.6 per cent.

The governor said that pumping in excessive liquidity in absence of proper infrastructure and other ‘well known investment impediments’ would only inflate inflation and worsen social inequity by promoting unproductive activities.

The next MPS would maintain the similar stand, with adopting cautious and restrained monetary stance and ensuring adequacy of credit growth, but avoiding excessive monetary expansion, said a BB official.