From Soviet rouble to oil-driven tenge: three decades of regime shifts

Kazakhstan's own central bank traces its modern monetary history through a sequence of distinct regimes rather than one continuous policy, beginning with the introduction of the tenge in November 1993 after the collapse of the Soviet rouble zone left the country needing its own currency almost overnight, followed by a decade of managed and crawling pegs as oil exports from the Caspian fields financed rapid, if volatile, growth through the 2000s. The National Bank's own strategy documents describe this early period as one where the exchange rate, not an inflation target, served as the main anchor for an economy still building the institutions, like a functioning government securities market and modern banking supervision, that inflation targeting normally requires. That framework reached its limits with the 2008-09 global crisis and again more severely with the 2014-15 oil price collapse, both of which forced sudden step devaluations rather than the gradual adjustments a more flexible regime might have allowed, a pattern the National Bank's post-2015 strategy explicitly cites as the rationale for moving permanently to free floating and inflation targeting rather than returning to any form of peg.