Officially, monetary policy is tight. The Central Bank of Uzbekistan has a base interest rate, the refinancing rate, set at 12% per year, well above the official rate of year-on-year inflation of around 7-8%. However, the authorities do not release any information on the money supply, and inflation is probably running at twice the rate of official figures (February 2011, Economic performance). The indications are therefore that monetary policy is loose-and is loosening, since the Central Bank reduced the refinancing rate from 14% to 12% at the beginning of the year, despite rising global food and commodity prices that are having an effect on Uzbek inflation. This suggests that the authorities are concerned to boost economic growth, despite the risks to inflation, and indicates that the economy is performing less well than claimed (see Economic performance).

Another aim of the Central Bank is to ensure that state-owned enterprises in key sectors are properly financed. There is therefore ample credit creation for the industrial sector and the authorities continue to instruct commercial banks on their lending practices. Although the authorities have taken measures to sterilise the commodities windfall by ring-fencing a proportion of energy export revenue in the FRD, their attempts to prevent credit creation from leading to an expansion in the money supply tend to be crude. Commercial banks, on government instruction, delay enterprises' access to their savings and make foreign-currency transactions difficult and time-consuming. As a result, there is an artificial hard-currency shortage in Uzbekistan, leading to the re-emergence of a dual exchange-rate system. There is an official exchange rate available to limited numbers of favoured enterprises and well-connected individuals, and a black-market exchange rate where the local currency trades at a 30% discount.