Zimbabwe gave up its unenviable position of having the world’s highest interest rate to Argentina, after slashing borrowing costs to help boost economic growth, Bloomberg News reported. The monetary policy committee cut the benchmark interest rate to 130% from 150%, which lags Argentina’s 133%. The MPC acted because of “emerging global risks and the need to keep exchange rate and inflation expectations anchored to support economic growth,” Governor John Mangudya said in an emailed statement on Tuesday.

Call it a quasi-central bank digital currency or a government-sponsored stable coin — Zimbabwe’s new gold-backed virtual token is the country’s latest attempt to end decades of chaos, according to a Bloomberg News commentary. The digital coin went live earlier this month in a bid to divert demand for US dollars in the landlocked African nation, where inflation has soared and the local Zimbabwean dollar is struggling. The idea, at least according to officials, is that the new token will give people and businesses an easy way to use the ultra-safe value of gold as a currency benchmark.

Zimbabwe plans to keep its local currency as legal tender, even as the US dollar is now the unit of choice for most transactions in the economy, Bloomberg News reported. The extensive use of US dollars doesn’t concern authorities, who instead see it as a way to access foreign currency, according to Mthuli Ncube, the southern African nation’s finance minister. The country is ineligible to access lines of credit from multilateral financial institutions because it owes more $14 billion.

Zimbabwe will hold talks with the US, UK and the European Union to end an impasse over $14 billion owed to external creditors as it seeks to shore up funding for development programs, Bloomberg News reported. The southern African nation has been locked out of international capital markets since defaulting on payments to the World Bank and other multilateral lenders more than two decades ago.

Zimbabwe's central bank has cut its policy rate by 50 percentage points to 150%, it said in a statement on Thursday, driven by a downward trend in inflation since late last year, Reuters reported. Monthly inflation fell to 1.1% in January from 2.4% in December, while yearly inflation dipped to 229.8% from 243.8%. "The moderation in interest rates is important and necessitated by the downward trend in the month-on-month inflation since the last quarter of 2022," said the bank, adding it expects the trend to continue into 2023.

Zimbabwe’s central bank raised interest rates to a record and the government officially reintroduced the US dollar as legal currency to rein in surging inflation and stabilize the nation’s tumbling exchange rate, Bloomberg News reported. The monetary policy committee more than doubled the key rate to 200% from 80%, Governor John Mangudya said in a statement on Monday. That brings the cumulative increase this year to 14,000 basis points -- the most globally. “The monetary policy committee expressed great concern on the recent rise in inflation,” Mangudya said.

Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa has imposed capital controls in an attempt to control the currency’s rapid depreciation, Bloomberg News reported. The Zimbabwean dollar has lost half of its value this year making it Africa’s worst performing currency. Banks in the country have been ordered to stop lending with immediate effect “to minimize the creation of broad money that is prone to abuse for purposes of manipulating the exchange rate,” Mnangagwa said in a televised speech.

Zimbabwe has selected Kuvimba Mining House Ltd., a state-owned company, which has been shrouded in controversy, to revive one of the continent’s largest steel mills, Bloomberg News reported. The miner, which already has vast interests in gold and nickel, has been picked as the “investment partner” to breath new life into the Zimbabwe Iron and Steel Company, which has been shut for 14 years. At its peak, the plant produced nearly 1 million tons of steel a year.

The International Monetary Fund on Tuesday said that it was precluded from providing financial support to Zimbabwe due to its "unsustainable debt and external arrears," and any lending arrangement would require a clear path to a comprehensive restructuring of the African country's external debt, Reuters reported. The IMF said that its staff completed a virtual mission to Zimbabwe from Oct. 16 to Nov. 16, and noted "significant" efforts by authorities there to stem inflation, contain budget deficits and reserve money growth.

Zimbabwe will use more than half of the $961 million allocated by the International Monetary Fund in the form of special drawing rights to support its beleaguered currency, Bloomberg News reported. The government abandoned a 1:1 peg between a precursor of the reintroduced Zimbabwe dollar and the greenback in February 2019. The currency now trades at 85.82 to the U.S. dollar and even lower on the black market, a plunge that’s made it difficult for the government to get it accepted locally, and it’s generally not tradable outside the country.