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Artur Stepanyan, a Central Bank of Armenia (CBA) Board member, gave his strong assurances the inflation rate in the county will remain low in the next few months.

“When we look at the external developments and how the government diligently deals with the supplies of essentials, we see no risks here,” he told a briefing on Friday, presenting the indicators of inflation and macroeconomic stability in the country.

“On March 17, we lowered the refinancing rate, while many countries in our region raised or kept them unchanged. It is clear that the monetary policy in this situation is limited, as its instrumentation cannot influence the real economic developments because of the ongoing health problems [caused by coronavirus]. However, it’s is important to maintain macroeconomic stability, which will allow the government to take targeted measures in different sectors of the economy,” said the representative of the Central Bank.

“Adhering to the floating exchange rate system, today we have enough reserves and multi-layer toolkit to free the foreign exchange market from possible shocks, which I think will not happen at this stage,” he said.

"All banks and credit organizations are well aware that, if necessary, we will implement some mitigation measures in this area so that the system can ease any possible adverse developments that may take place in the future," Stepanyan said.

Noting that the CBA works closely with the financial market representatives and citizens by responding to their questions, Artur Stepanyan said: "It’s important for banks to work closely with clients to overcome the insurmountable difficulties they are facing and to reach new agreements so that their clients' credit burden does not increase and they do not get a negative credit report."

The CBA Board member called people to use online applications to limit contacts.