BANGLADESH-POLITICS-CURRENCY
A man counts newly released 1,000 Taka denomination banknotes at a currency exchange shop in Dhaka on June 2, 2025. Bangladesh on June 1 issued new banknotes to replace designs featuring its founding president, the father of ousted prime minister Sheikh Hasina, who was overthrown last year. Until now, all notes featured the portrait of her father, the late Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who led Bangladesh from independence from Pakistan in 1971 until soldiers assassinated him and most of his family in a 1975 coup. Photo by MUNIR UZ ZAMAN/AFP via Getty Images

Dhaka — Bangladesh's foreign-exchange cushion thickened again on Thursday, with Bangladesh Bank putting gross reserves at $36.16 billion as of 8 October. The move is small in a single day and large in what it says about a year in which the external account has stopped bleeding the way it did in 2024.

Spokesperson Arif Hossain Khan said gross reserves stood at $36.15856 billion. A day earlier, on 7 October, the same stock was $36.12358 billion, so the till rose by roughly $35 million in twenty-four hours. Reserves counted under the IMF's BPM6 manual — the stricter measure markets and the Fund actually use — reached $31.34944 billion, from $31.31119 billion the day before, a gain of about $38 million. The gap between the two numbers is not a mystery. BPM6 strips out items that cannot be spent at will. Net, usable reserves sit lower still once short-term liabilities are taken off.

The taka did not flinch. It was quoted around 123.10 on 9 October, consistent with the more flexible rate regime the central bank has been running since the worst of the dollar shortage. A quiet currency alongside a rising reserve stock is the combination policymakers have wanted: inflows covering the import bill without a daily scramble in the kerb market.

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The level is a long way from the trough. At the end of 2024 gross reserves were near $21.4 billion. By mid-2026 Moody's was already citing a stock around $32.9 billion, more than four months of import cover, when it lifted the sovereign outlook from negative to stable and left the B2 rating unchanged. Thursday's print sits above that mid-year mark.

Remittances did much of the repair. Inflows in the fiscal year to June hit a record $35.56 billion, up 17.3 percent, and a larger share has been arriving through banks rather than informal channels. Export earnings have been less helpful. Garment orders have softened with US apparel imports, so the reserve rebuild is still more a remittance story than a trade story.

That matters for how the figure should be read. A $35 million daily rise is not a boom. It is the absence of a drain. Import payments, debt service and the cost of fuel still leave the central bank every week. Brent has been elevated, and a September fuel-price increase at home will eventually show up in the energy import bill. If those outflows accelerate faster than wage earners send money home, the $36 billion handle can slip without any change in policy.

There is also a quality question. Gross reserves include assets that are not free to sell into the market tomorrow. The BPM6 stock, just above $31 billion, is the better guide to how many months of imports Bangladesh can actually pay for if private credit lines tighten. Even that number looks comfortable only if remittances keep arriving and if the banking system does not need another round of dollar support to cover letters of credit.

For now the direction is the news. After two years in which every reserve print was scanned for signs of a new low, a Thursday gain to $36.16 billion is the kind of dull headline the external account needed. Dull will stay dull only if October's remittances match the run-rate that rebuilt the stock in the first place.

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