currency

Senegal’s outspoken and combative opposition leader Ousmane Sonko was disqualified from running for president in the March 24 presidential election, but he had the last laugh on Thursday when his former lieutenant Bassirou Diomaye Faye appointed him as prime minister. Faye ran in Sonko’s place and won a resounding victory with over 54 percent of the vote.

Vladimir Putin said Javier Milei’s plan to use the U.S. dollar as currency in Argentina would bring a “significant loss of sovereignty.”

Mazen Ahmed, director of investments and remittances at the Central Bank of Iraq (CBI), said on Thursday that cash withdrawals and transactions using U.S. dollars will be banned effective January 1, 2024.

Chairman of Ukraine’s National Bank thanks Western partners for cash as reserves now the largest in history.

CARACAS, Venezuela – Socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro proclaimed on Wednesday that the de-dollarization of world trade is “inevitable,” the latest in a series of statements against the U.S. currency.

India and Russia on Thursday suspended talks about using the Indian rupee as currency to settle their bilateral trade, greatly disappointing Indian importers who wanted Russia to embrace their national currency but reassuring Americans worried about the dollar losing its coveted position as the standard medium of international trade.

Hundreds of protesters, including large numbers of retired soldiers and police, marched in downtown Beirut on Wednesday to protest Lebanon’s deteriorating economy. When the protesters attempted to breach a fence and storm the government headquarters building, security forces used tear gas to disperse them, and some of the demonstrators responded by throwing rocks.

Australia’s left-wing Labor government has approved a new design to replace the portrait of Queen Elizabeth II on its A$5 bank note, thus defeating any chance King Charles III would automatically take her place. The late Queen was initially featured

The leftist governments of Argentina and Brazil will soon begin proceedings for the creation of a new common currency, tentatively called “sur” (South), the Financial Times claimed in a report on Sunday.

Russian Foreign Ministry official Zamir Kabulov said on Wednesday that Russia and India are taking steps to use their respective national currencies for trading with each other, instead of U.S. dollars or euros.

China has agreed to expand its currency swap deal with Argentina by $5 billion following a meeting between Communist Chinese dictator Xi Jinping and Argentina’s leftist President Alberto Fernández held during the Group of 20 (G20) summit in Bali on Tuesday.

Indian traders have reportedly been settling payments for Russian coal in currencies other than the U.S. dollar — including the Chinese yuan, the Hong Kong dollar, the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) dirham, and the euro — in an effort to skirt Western sanctions imposed on Moscow in recent months in response to its latest war with Ukraine, Reuters reported on Wednesday.

Indian Commerce Secretary B.V.R. Subrahmanyam predicted this week that New Delhi will conduct up to $9 billion worth of trade with Russia and Sri Lanka combined over the next two months, Reuters reported on Wednesday.

Colombia’s currency and stock index fell sharply on Tuesday, a market aftershock to the election of leftist former guerrilla Gustavo Petro as president on Sunday. 

Russian companies have increasingly turned to China and India to sell products originally intended for U.S.-allied markets in recent months due to Western sanctions against Moscow, China’s state-run Global Times reported on Tuesday, noting that these alternative transactions are often settled in local currencies.

Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe announced on Monday that his nation had “run out” of petroleum-based fuel during a national address in which he predicted that the next two months will be “the most difficult ones of our lives,” Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

Brazilian ex-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a socialist running for president again this year after his judicial appointees overturned a 25-year prison sentence for corruption, used a campaign rally this weekend to promote the creation of a pan-American currency.

Nigeria will consider conducting trade with Russia in national currencies, i.e., in Russian rubles, “if necessary,” Nigerian Ambassador to Moscow Abdullahi Shehu told Russia’s state-owned Sputnik news agency on Thursday.

The Russian ruble crashed amid a public frenzy to pull cash out of bank accounts on Monday, instantly knocking almost 30 percent off the value of a currency that was not in good shape to begin with.

CARACAS — The socialist regime of Venezuela recently imposed a new tax on all foreign currency payments to civilians and companies. Now that the country is being held together by the once illegal and demonized U.S. dollar, the regime wants their fat slice of everyone’s money.

El Salvador President Nayib Bukele denounced on Wednesday an effort by U.S. senators to introduce legislation that would “mitigate potential risks to the U.S. financial system” allegedly posed by El Salvador’s adoption of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin as a legal tender.

Inflation within the Eurozone hit nearly 5 per cent in November, the highest level recorded since the Euro was introduced in 1999.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said Wednesday that it will block Afghanistan from accessing $460 million in emergency monetary reserves that were scheduled to be disbursed next week.

CARACAS, Venezuela – “Are you paying with bolivars or foreing currency?”

The Financial Times (FT) reported on Friday that China’s currency, the renminbi, had its biggest rally in 15 years, driven by increased foreign demand and “rising expectations that a Joe Biden victory in next month’s U.S. presidential election could help reset relations between the two superpowers.”

While his people suffer through grinding poverty, Venezuela’s socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro is spending vast sums on printing huge piles of rapidly-depreciating paper currency.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers in Eagle Pass, Texas, seized nearly $200,000 in unreported currency being smuggled into Mexico. This adds to the increasing amount of cash being seized at ports of entry.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk tendered his resignation on Friday after he was secretly recorded saying that President Volodymyr Zelensky does not understand economics.

Lebanese security forces detained at least a hundred demonstrators on Thursday as Lebanon’s long-running but mostly peaceful anti-government protests turned violent for the second night in a row. Dozens of people were reportedly injured in clashes with the police.

“China has made enforceable commitments to refrain from competitive devaluation,” Treasury Secretary Mnuchin said.

The Chinese government allowed the tightly controlled yuan to fall to the lowest level in a decade after the U.S. imposed tariffs.

The Central Bank of Venezuela released on Thursday a new set of banknotes for the second time in under a year, as rampant hyperinflation continues to ravage the socialist country’s crippled economy. 

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) proposed legislation Wednesday to save $150 million by allowing the U.S. Mint to change the composition of coins.

Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa on Tuesday gave his first State of the Nation speech since winning a full term in office in July. Opposition lawmakers from the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party heckled Mnangagwa’s speech and then walked out in protest.

Venezuela’s Central Bank introduced a “sovereign calculator” app this week to help people work out the value of the country’s new currency denominations.

China’s state-run Global Times told readers to remain calm as the economy of Turkey teeters on the brink of collapse, but the real point of the editorial was to insist China is in far better shape than Turkey despite grappling with a currency crisis of its own.