A divided central bank and the 2020 devaluation

After Libya's political split in 2014, rival governments in Tripoli and the east each claimed authority over oil revenue and the Central Bank of Libya, and although the bank stayed formally unified, it struggled to fund budgets or maintain a single exchange-rate policy. Oil blockades repeatedly cut output, which fell from about 1.6 million barrels per day before 2011 to a fraction of that in some years, and the gap between the official and parallel exchange rates widened sharply. At the end of 2020 the central bank devalued the dinar from 1.4 to about 4.5 per US dollar in an attempt to narrow that gap and reduce spending pressure, and a unified government later reinforced the effort. The swings in Libya's output and price charts since 2011 mostly follow how much oil could be exported at any time, rather than ordinary demand cycles.