Impressive potential in Nigeria

The Nigerian government has bowed to the inevitable and scrapped its currency peg to the US dollar.

799-Naira-1200

Bowing to the inevitable: the naira lost its dollar peg

"I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did," John Ashbourne of Capital Economics told The Wall Street Journal. The Nigerian government bowed to the inevitable last week and scrapped its currency peg of 197 naira to the US dollar, which had been in place for over a year. The naira, which had already reached a rate of 370 to the greenback on the black market, promptly slid by around 30%.

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Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.