The 2015 tenge float and the end of the crawling peg

Kazakhstan's National Bank had spent years managing the tenge within a series of bands pegged loosely to the dollar, a policy that became untenable once oil prices, the source of roughly half of government revenue in an economy still built on hydrocarbons, collapsed by more than half between mid-2014 and early 2015, draining the reserves the bank needed to keep defending the currency. On August 20, 2015, the government and the National Bank announced they would let the tenge trade freely rather than keep selling down reserves, a decision the Bank's own 2015 annual report frames not as a devaluation but as a necessary transition to a market-determined rate once the Bank had become almost the only seller of foreign currency left in the market. The tenge still lost more than a fifth of its value immediately and continued falling through the rest of the year, closing 2015 roughly 86.5% weaker against the dollar than where it started, with the weighted average rate for the year settling near 222.6 per dollar. The float was paired with a shift to a new inflation-targeting framework, including a base rate introduced in September 2015, replacing the exchange rate as the Bank's primary policy anchor.