Purbaya on Rupiah Plummeting to 18,000 per US Dollar
Finance Minister Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa has responded to the weakening of the rupiah exchange rate, which has breached the level of Rp 18,000 per US dollar. He stated that this depreciation would impact the increasing size of the debt that the government must repay.
Purbaya noted that the coupons on government debt or yields paid by the government are at a fixed rate. “This is still within the range of our calculations that I previously mentioned,” he said when met at the DPR Building on Thursday, 4 June 2026.
The State Treasurer explained that the government has conducted calculation simulations for scenarios involving rising crude oil prices. Meanwhile, the assumed rupiah exchange rate in the 2026 State Budget (APBN) is Rp 16,500 per US dollar.
However, Purbaya was reluctant to disclose the specific rupiah levels used in those simulations. “The adjustment is quite high, but I will not specify it, otherwise the rupiah might weaken significantly. But fundamentally, the rupiah is below the current level, stronger than it is now,” he remarked.
The former Chairman of the Board of Commissioners of the Indonesia Deposit Insurance Corporation (LPS) also revealed that the Ministry of Finance has injected Rp 8 trillion into intervention operations in the bond market. This intervention involved the repurchase of Government Securities (SBN) sold by investors. He claimed this intervention has stabilised the 10-year SBN yield.
In Thursday morning trading, the rupiah exchange rate against the US dollar faced further pressure, dropping 0.27 per cent to reach Rp 18,015 per US dollar. This position represents one of the rupiah’s weakest levels in recent times, marking the ‘Garuda’ currency’s approach to a new psychological threshold of Rp 18,000 per dollar.
Currency analyst Lukman Leong from Doo Financial Futures assessed that this weakness reflects strong external pressure amidst increasing global uncertainty, coupled with less favourable domestic sentiment. “The rupiah is expected to weaken against the strengthening US dollar amidst rising geopolitical tensions in the Middle East,” he said, as quoted by Antara.