[ad_1]
The Zimbabwean government announced on December 8 that John Mushayavanhu will take over as central bank governor next year. He will succeed John Mangudya, who will become head of a new sovereign wealth fund once his term as governor ends on April 30.
Mushayavanhu has been chief executive of FBC Holdings, which owns commercial lender FBC Bank, since June 2011. He was previously managing director at FBC, and has also worked at Standard Chartered. He holds an MBA from Brunel University in London, and a doctorate in business administration from Binary University, a private university in Malaysia.
Mangudya became governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) in May 2014, on the appointment of then-president Robert Mugabe. In 2019, Mugabe’s successor, Emmerson Mnangagwa, named Mangudya to a second and final five-year term. Mangudya will now become chief executive of the Mutapa Investment Fund, a sovereign wealth fund established earlier this year.
The departing governor oversaw the reintroduction of a Zimbabwean currency in electronic form in 2019. Zimbabwe abandoned its dollar in 2009 after severe hyperinflation. The new Zimbabwean dollar has suffered its own bouts of depreciation, and the country has experienced periods of high inflation during Mangudya’s tenure.
According to official statistics, headline inflation was 21.6% year on year in November, reflecting new inflation methodology that accounts for the high rate of dollarisation in the economy. On November 24, Steve Hanke, a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University in the US, estimated year-on-year inflation in Zimbabwe at 806%.
The central bank and Zimbabwean authorities have taken drastic measures to arrest inflation. In June 2022, the central bank raised its policy rate from 80% to 200%. A month before that, president Mnangagwa announced a freeze on bank lending, purportedly to prevent speculation in foreign currency. Mangudya described the ban, which lasted for 10 days, as a way to slow credit expansion.
The RBZ has also introduced gold coins in 2022, followed by gold-backed electronic tokens earlier this year. These are offered as a store of value to the public.
[ad_2]
Source link