An expert told Shafaq News: 90 trillion dinars are hoarded by Iraqis and do not reach the banks.
An expert told Shafaq News: 90 trillion dinars are hoarded by Iraqis and do not reach the banks.
2025-11-02 01:09
Shafaq News – Baghdad
Financial expert Mahmoud Dagher revealed on Sunday that the amount of cash held by the “public” is estimated at about 90 trillion dinars, out of a total of 98 trillion dinars that is the size of the cash mass in Iraq.
Dagher, who previously served as a director at the Central Bank of Iraq, told Shafaq News Agency that “the volume of issued cash is around 98 trillion dinars, of which 88 to 90 trillion are in the hands of the public.”
He added, “The public does not only mean the people, but also the merchants, the contracting companies, and the industrialists,” explaining that “Iraqis hoard money instead of depositing it in banks, because our society likes to deal in cash and needs a long time to get used to electronic payment methods, in addition to the lack of trust in banks among some depositors after the setbacks that occurred in the banks.”
He pointed out that “all these matters are considered behavioral issues, as people are accustomed to keeping a portion of their money, and so are companies, therefore Iraqis think this way.”
According to specialists, this phenomenon has many negative aspects, including that the central bank loses its actual control over the money supply, and that its tools such as the interest rate or rediscount become less effective, while banks suffer from a shortage of liquidity, which weakens their ability to finance projects and pushes investors towards informal financing, in addition to the difficulty of managing inflation due to the money supply not officially circulating, which negatively affects the central bank’s decisions in achieving its main goal, which is to control the general level of prices and achieve stability.
shafaq.com
