Where is the rupee-dollar market?

In two blog posts three months ago, I put together data from the BIS and the RBI to suggest that half of the rupee-dollar market is outside India. Now we have the data from the BIS. Table D.6 gives the location wise break up of the rupee-dollar market: 50% is in India, 16% is in Singapore, 12% in UK, 11% in Hong Kong, and 9% in the US with the balance scattered across four countries (Switzerland, Australia, Japan and Canada) each with less than 0.5%. The offshore market exceeds $20 billion a day.

One of the reasons most people underestimated the size of this market is that they were looking only at Singapore, while the market is spread across several locations.

Posted at 9:09 pm IST on Thu, 2 Dec 2010         permanent link

Categories: derivatives, international finance

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