The Price and promise of a solitary monetary policy

In 2025, the Bank of Ghana (BoG) accomplished something of extraordinary monetary significance. The cedi appreciated by 40.7 percent against the US dollar, its first annual gain in more than three decades and, on IMF data, the strongest performance of any African currency. Headline inflation, which had peaked at 54.1 percent in late 2022, fell to 5.4 percent by year-end, and gross international reserves rose to a record US$13.83 billion. The same year produced large losses on the Bank’s balance sheet. Its audited statements, released on 30 April 2026, show a net operating loss of GHS 15.63 billion, up from GHS 9.49 billion in 2024, and a further loss of GHS 19.32 billion in other comprehensive income. The combined loss of GHS 34.95 billion pushed cumulative negative equity to about GHS 96.3 billion. Severed from their context, these figures read as catastrophe. Situated within the history of coordinated exchange-rate statecraft, they read as something else entirely: the quantified cost of macroeconomic stewardship in the absence of multilateral burden-sharing.