State agencies will deal with false financial speculators – Akufo-Addo

President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo says relevant state agencies will be taking actions against persons who cause panic in the financial system through false publications.

He said because speculations based on falsehood and the activities of the black market have worsened the performance of the cedi in the financial market experiencing turbulence because of low inflows of foreign exchange.

“An anonymous two-minute audio message on a WhatsApp platform predicting a so-called haircut on government bonds sent all of us into banks and forex bureaus to dump our cedis, and, before we knew it, the cedi had depreciated further,” President Akufo-Addo said in a televised address to the nation.

He encouraged the citizens to keep the cedi as a good store of value and avoid speculations to restore confidence in the currency.

He added that, “If you talk down your money, it will go down. If you allow some unidentifiable persons to talk down your money, it will go down.”

President Akufo-Addo assured that no individual or institutional investor, including pension funds in government treasury bills or instruments would lose their money because of the ongoing International Monetary Fund (IMF) negotiations.

“There will be no ‘haircuts’, so I urge all of you to ignore the false rumours, just as, in the banking sector clean-up, government ensured that the 4.6 million depositors affected by the exercise did not lose their deposits.”

Following growing speculations on the financial market, the Ministry of Finance on October 14, 2022, issued a statement describing publications on the possibility of a “haircut” as “without merit and are designed to undermine confidence in Ghana’s financial sector.”

A ‘haircut’ is a term in finance used to describe to a situation where there is a reduction applied to the value of an asset, often expressed as a percentage.

Source: GNA