Last week a headline said Belarusians had handed in almost 1.5 billion dollars of foreign currency in a single month. The real figure is 274 million. The 1.5 billion is the gross amount households sold before subtracting what they bought, and the correct number sat two paragraphs below the headline in the same article. The difference is more than fivefold, and it points the story the wrong way.
Three numbers, one release
The National Bank publishes household currency operations every month. For August 2026, as reported by BelTA from the bank’s press service, households bought 1.183 billion dollars and sold 1.457 billion. The difference — what they gave up on balance — is 274 million.
All three figures appear in the release. The headline took the second one.
This matters because gross and net answer different questions. Gross turnover tells you how busy the exchange windows were. Net tells you whether households are giving up currency or accumulating it. A country where people change money often can have a large gross figure and no net movement at all.
The headline took the gross figure. The right one was two paragraphs down.
What the correct figure shows
Households have been net sellers all year. Over January to August the running total is 1.61 billion dollars sold more than bought.
We wrote about this run on 13 August, when the July figure was 337.5 million and the seven-month total 1.3 billion. August adds 274 million, and the two totals reconcile.
What we cannot say is whether August was weak. The monthly series over the past two years runs from about 45 million to over 600 million, a spread of more than ten times. Against that, a move from 337 to 274 is inside the ordinary variation, and calling it a slowdown would repeat the original error in the opposite direction.
Who is on the other side
The more interesting part of the release is the comparison the headlines skipped.
Over the same eight months, resident companies were net buyers of 895 million dollars. A year earlier, over the same period, they bought 1.439 billion on balance. Corporate demand for foreign currency is running about 38% below last year.
So the picture is households selling steadily while the companies that would normally absorb that currency need less of it than before. Total market turnover, meanwhile, reached 101.6 billion dollars over eight months, some 21% above the same period of 2025.
The National Bank’s own explanation for the household side is rates: deposits in Belarusian rubles pay enough that people close currency accounts and move to the national currency. That is a reasonable account of a decision, and it does not require anyone to be in difficulty.
Households sell steadily. The companies that would absorb it need less than last year.
Calling August a slowdown would repeat the same error in the other direction.
Why the mistake is worth naming
A fivefold error in a widely shared figure would matter on its own. It matters more here because the two readings support opposite stories.
At 1.5 billion a month, households are dumping currency at a pace that suggests something urgent. At 274 million, they are doing what they have done every month for over a year, at the smaller end of the usual range. The first reading invites alarm; the second invites a question about deposit rates.
Neither reading is available from the headline figure alone, which is the argument for checking gross against net before repeating a number. The release contained everything needed. Nobody had to find a source.
The release contained everything needed. Nobody had to find a source.
Confidence
Watch
The September release, due in early October, puts the monthly net figure inside the 45 to 640 million range that has held since 2024.
Corporate net purchases for the full year come in below 2025’s level. Through August they are 38% lower.
Household net sales for 2026 exceed the 1.61 billion already recorded by the end of August.
The National Bank publishes deposit-rate data alongside the currency release, which would let its own explanation be tested.
Method and limits
The August figures are the National Bank’s, as reported by BelTA from its press service on 8 September. We could not open the bank’s own statistical tables: its site refuses automated access, and so does the financial portal we tried. So the primary document here is a press-service account, not the table it summarises.
Our monthly range of 45 to 640 million is reconstructed from monthly reports in our own corpus, not from the bank’s series. Those reports carry three different figures in the same paragraph — household net, company net, and the running annual total — and separating them takes hand-checking, which we have not completed. The range is therefore indicative, and the piece uses it only to say that August is unremarkable, not to place it precisely.