The Central Bank's Books

The first era, 2004 to 2008, is a rebuilding. Gross foreign assets rise from the equivalent of $7bn at the end of 2004 to $49bn four years later, on the back of a quadrupling oil price and a dollar inflow protected from creditor attachment by international arrangement. Audited total assets follow the same curve: 25.7 trillion dinars in 2005 against 64.8 trillion in 2008. In this period the Central Bank is doing what a central bank in a rentier economy is expected to do — converting an external windfall into a domestic buffer.

The 2009 oil shock interrupts it. Revenue falls by more than a third year on year, and for the first time the reserve line goes sideways: the equivalent of $44.6bn at the end of 2009 against $49.3bn a year earlier. The window, however, does not contract in proportion. Documented sales that year are $34.0bn against oil income of $40.5bn — the highest ratio of the decade. The buffer absorbs the difference.

The peak is 2013. Total assets reach 95.2 trillion dinars, the largest figure in the recovered series, and gross foreign assets stand at 90.5 trillion dinars — the equivalent of $77.6bn at that year's official rate of 1,166 to the dollar. On any conventional reading Iraq entered 2014 with a substantial external cushion.

The drawdown that follows is the most consequential passage in these books. The oil price collapses and the ISIS offensive begins in the same year. Reserves fall by the equivalent of $11.3bn in 2014, $12.5bn in 2015 and $8.6bn in 2016 — a cumulative loss of roughly $32bn of the nation's external buffer in three years. Through all of it the window stayed open: $54.5bn sold in 2014, $44.3bn in 2015, $33.5bn in 2016, at an official rate held fixed while the street rate moved away from it. The reserve was being spent at precisely the moment the mechanism was most profitable to its participants.

Recovery is partial. Gross foreign assets rise again in 2017 and 2018, to the equivalent of $48.3bn and $57.8bn — still below the 2013 level. And there the record stops: the audited statements after financial year 2015 and the indicator workbook after December 2018 have not been recovered. The post-2018 series is an open item, stated here as pending extraction rather than estimated. What the Central Bank's own books show for the last seven years of this file is, at present, unknown to the public.