Angola abandons the kwanza's dollar peg for a managed float

After defending a managed peg for years through direct administrative rate-setting, the Banco Nacional de Angola announced a new exchange-rate regime on January 9, 2018, replacing the fixed system in which the central bank itself determined the kwanza's value with a trading-band approach that let supply and demand play a far larger role within a defined floor and ceiling. The kwanza weakened immediately once the new regime took hold, falling at its first post-reform currency auctions as pent-up devaluation pressure that had built up under the old peg was released in a more market-driven way, part of a broader liberalization push that accompanied an extended IMF-supported program agreed around the same period. The move reflected a deliberate shift in BNA's framework: the bank subsequently described itself as committed to a flexible exchange rate that could act as the primary absorber of external shocks, such as further swings in oil prices, rather than requiring politically costly step devaluations each time pressure built up. That stated commitment carried through later years, with the central bank continuing to let the kwanza adjust gradually rather than return to a fixed peg, even as oil-price volatility kept recurring through the following years of Angola's long post-2014 adjustment.