About the AUD/BBD rate
The AUD/BBD rate is how many BBD one Australian dollar buys. It moves constantly with interest-rate expectations, commodity prices and global risk sentiment - see what moves the rate. Tradergy shows the mid-market reference rate and does not forecast where it’s heading. For the 52-week highs and lows and a daily table, see the AUD/BBD rate history.
Related views of this rate: the reverse rate, BBD → AUD, is on the receiving Barbadian dollar view, and sending Australian dollars to Barbados is covered on the AUD → BBD transfer page. Every AUD pair sits on the convert hub, and to work in more than one currency at once there is the currency converter.
How the fixed rate is actually held
The Central Bank of Barbados Act 2020 gives the Bank the primary objective of maintaining the value of the currency, and requires it to use its best endeavours to keep external assets at a level adequate for the country's international transactions. The provisions that follow say what happens when the arrangement comes under strain. If reserves fall far enough to jeopardise the fixed exchange rate regime, the Act obliges the Bank's Executive Committee to report to the Minister of Finance setting out the causes and the remedies it recommends. The duty that bites is a duty to escalate.
Holding a rate also means not printing your way out of a deficit, and the same Act draws that line numerically. Temporary advances to the Government are capped at 7.5 per cent of the average ordinary revenue of the preceding three financial years. Emergency purchases of government securities on the primary market are capped at 3 per cent of gross domestic product and are available only where a public emergency has been formally declared. The International Monetary Fund credits that 2020 revision with strengthening the framework by enhancing the Bank's autonomy and limiting monetary financing.
Access to foreign currency is rationed by a separate statute. Under the Exchange Control Act, every purchase of foreign currency by a resident passes through an authorised dealer, and the Central Bank of Barbados publishes the standing allowances: 20,000 Barbados dollars a person for holiday travel, 1,000 a day and 60,000 a calendar year for business travel, and 2,500 in physical notes per person per trip. Anything larger is an application.
That machinery has been tested inside living memory. Barbados restructured its domestic public debt in November 2018 and its external debt in December 2019, under an International Monetary Fund Extended Fund Facility of about 290 million United States dollars approved in October 2018. The rate did not move. The Fund recorded reserves at a low of 220 million United States dollars in 2018, the year the programme began.
Sources: Central Bank of Barbados Act, 2020 · Central Bank of Barbados, Exchange Control FAQs · International Monetary Fund, IMF Executive Board Approves US$290 million Extended Arrangement under the Extended Fund Facility for Barbados, Press Release, 1 October 2018 · International Monetary Fund, Barbados Country Report No. 22/377