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UPDATE 1-Mexico cbank to continue dollar sales

Published 02/10/2009, 10:19 PM
Updated 02/10/2009, 10:24 PM
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KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 11 (Reuters) - Mexico's central bank will continue with its policy of intervening in foreign exchange markets to sell dollars, the country's central bank governor said on Wednesday.

The decline in the value of the peso has been a major factor in stubborn inflation pressures in Mexico and data this week showed that while headline inflation had fallen year-on-year, core inflation had risen on an annual basis.

"We continue to intervene in the coming weeks because the volatility in world financial markets is unlikely to abate," Guillermo Ortiz told Reuters on the sidelines of a conference in Kuala Lumpur.

Ortiz said that the central bank would continue with what he said were "direct" interventions of the past few days.

"There were certain players that had taken advantage of this predictability (of the auction system) to build positions," he said.

Mexico's peso has lost around a quarter of its value against the dollar since August as the global credit crisis spurred investors to dump emerging market assets and it hit a record low last week.

Mexico has sold dollars via regular auctions since October to fight currency volatility and the central bank on Tuesday said it had spent over $1 billion defending the peso last week. [ID:nN10287582].

That action has caused Fitch Ratings to say that it was monitoring the currency interventions as part of a broader analysis to decide whether to downgrade its ratings.

The peso weakened 1.97 percent at the central bank's final reference to 14.4825 per dollar on Tuesday, losing ground for the first time in five sessions.

Ortiz declined to comment directly on the central bank's rate policy but said that recent inflation data was in line with expectations.

"We will see better core numbers," he said.

Goldman Sachs said in a report that it expected the central bank to cut rates by a total of 175 basis points to 6 percent by June. Ortiz declined to comment on whether this was a realistic assumption.

(Reporting by David Chance; editing by Tomasz Janowski)

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