{"id":9281,"date":"2023-04-14T08:02:29","date_gmt":"2023-04-14T08:02:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/ghana-expects-imf-loan\/"},"modified":"2023-04-14T08:03:30","modified_gmt":"2023-04-14T08:03:30","slug":"ghana-expects-imf-loan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/ghana-expects-imf-loan\/","title":{"rendered":"Ghana expects IMF loan approval in May – minister"},"content":{"rendered":"

(This April 13 story has been corrected to change IMF loan approval to May from June in the headline and first paragraph)<\/p>\n

ACCRA (Reuters) – Ghana expects the International Monetary Fund’s board to approve a $3 billion loan in May, Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta said in a presentation on Thursday.<\/p>\n

The embattled West African country secured a staff-level agreement with the IMF for the $3 billion support package in December. But the Fund requires bilateral lenders to provide assurances they will restructure its debt as a condition of signing off on the loan.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Ofori-Atta said that official creditor financial assurances are expected by May and that the country’s domestic debt exchange programme would yield 38 billion cedis of debt service savings in 2023.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 He added that $20 billion of external debt was eligible for restructuring, 66% of the external debt stock. Of that, $5.4 billion in official creditor debt will be restructured.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A memorandum of understanding with official creditors and an agreement in principle on Eurobond restructuring are expected by July, with a 2030 Eurobond partially guaranteed by the World Bank included in the restructuring, the minister said.<\/p>\n

He added that Ghana needs a $1.5 billion financial stability fund to ensure appropriate solvency and liquidity.<\/p>\n

“The World Bank has fortunately agreed to support this fund with a quarter of a billion… and government, looking at the space we have, also committing about $500 million to that,” Ofori-Atta said at the virtual briefing.<\/p>\n

Ghana’s net foreign exchange reserves fell sharply in 2022 and are currently $2.6 billion, central bank governor Ernest Addison said in the briefing.<\/p>\n

The government also aims to bring rampant inflation down to 8% in the medium term and is targeting real GDP growth of 5% over the same period, a presentation accompanying the briefing said.<\/p>\n

Ghana’s inflation reached a more than two-decade high of 54.1% in December, but has since slowed, falling to 45% year-on-year in March.<\/p>\n

\n

(Reporting by Anait Miridzhanian, Rachel Savage and Libby George; Writing by Sofia Christensen; Editing by Estelle Shirbon)<\/p>\n

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(This April 13 story has been corrected to change IMF loan approval to May from June in the headline and first paragraph) ACCRA (Reuters) – Ghana expects the International Monetary Fund’s board to approve a $3 billion loan in May, Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta said in a presentation on Thursday. The embattled West African country […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":9282,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1216],"tags":[1223],"class_list":["post-9281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-u-s-economy","tag-updated"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-content\/uploads\/Reuters_Direct_Media\/USOnlineReportEconomy\/tagreuters.com2023binary_LYNXMPEJ3C0L9-VIEWIMAGE.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9281"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10205,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9281\/revisions\/10205"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}