Banking

HARARE (Capital Markets in Africa) – Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa is trying to emulate Russian President Vladimir Putin in his attempt to revive Africa’s worst performing currency. Mnangagwa’s administration may announce plans as early as this week for government departments in Zimbabwe — under U.S. sanctions for economic mismanagement and human rights violations for the past two decades — to show “high preference” for the Zimbabwe dollar in the payment of services, according to Persistence…

NEW YORK (Capital Markets in Africa) – Goldman Sachs Group Inc. offered its first ever lending facility backed by Bitcoin, in a significant step for a major U.S. bank that accelerates Wall Street’s embrace of cryptocurrencies.  The secured lending facility lent cash collateralized by Bitcoin owned by the borrower, a spokeswoman for the bank said. The deal was interesting to Goldman because of its structure and 24-hour risk management, she said in an email. Wall…

GABORONE (Capital Markets in Africa) –  Botswana increased its revamped interest rate to counter inflationary pressures stemming from Russia’s war with Ukraine. The central bank’s policy committee raised the yield on the main monetary operations instrument by 51 basis points to 1.65%, Governor Moses Pelaelo told reporters in the capital, Gaborone, on Thursday.The bank in February said it would shift to using the yield on the seven-day Bank of Botswana certificate, known as the monetary policy rate,…

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) – Several central banks and the Bank for International Settlements have developed prototypes for a common digital currencies platform that has the potential to make cross-border payments more efficient. The two prototypes demonstrate the technical viability of such a platform, the BIS said in a statement Tuesday with the Reserve Bank of Australia, Bank Negara Malaysia, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and the South African Reserve Bank. Codenamed “Project Dunbar,”…

ACCRA (Capital Markets in Africa) – Ghana’s central bank will need to raise interest rates further this year unless a decline in the cedi is arrested, Goldman Sachs Group Inc.and Absa Group Ltd. said. The West African nation increased borrowing costs by the biggest margin in two decades on Monday to arrest inflation that accelerated at the fastest pace in almost six years in February and stem a depreciation in the cedi. The currency has weakened more than 17%…

CAIRO (Capital Markets in Africa) – Egypt hiked its benchmark interest rate for the first time since 2017 at an unscheduled meeting and let its currency weaken sharply as it moved to absorb shocks from global inflationary pressures.  The central bank raised the deposit and lending rates by 100 basis points each to 9.25% and 10.25% respectively, the Monetary Policy Committee said Monday. A combination of soaring commodity and energy prices and a wave of global monetary…

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) – Nigeria’s central bank left its benchmark interest rate unchanged as it seeks to boost growth in an economy battling with gasoline shortages and power failures amid rising imported inflation.  Six members of the monetary policy committee who attended the one-day meeting voted to keep the rate at 11.5%, Governor Godwin Emefiele said Monday in a virtual briefing from the capital, Abuja. This matched economists forecasts of a hold in…