Ulaanbaatar: Mongolia’s currency is on its longest losing streak on record as the government grapples to contain an economic crisis, BBC reported.
The tugrik lost about 7.8% of its value this month, making it the world’s worst-performing currency, says Bloomberg data.
It’s been a rapid descent from grace for the central Asian nation, which neighbors China and Russia.
The landlocked country has substantial untapped reserves of valuable minerals like gold, copper and coal. But then commodity prices collapsed. And so did demand from China, which buys 90% of Mongolia’s exports.
The government has since admitted that the country is “in a deep state of economic crisis”.
Finance Minister Choijilsuren Battogtokh said in a nationally televised address last week that they weren’t able to afford to pay civil servants or the military.
Making matters worse has been the government’s inconsistent approach to investment laws and mining agreements, causing many foreign firms to rush for the exit.
Foreign direct investment in Mongolia plummeted by 85% since 2011 to the first quarter of last year, according to the US State Department.
Mongolia’s tugrik is world’s worst performing currency
Mongolia’s tugrik is world’s worst performing currency
End of US-Russia nuclear pact a ‘grave moment’: UN chief
- Guterres urged Washington and Moscow “to return to the negotiating table without delay and to agree upon a successor framework”
UNITED NATIONS, United States: UN chief Antonio Guterres on Wednesday urged the United States and Russia to quickly sign a new nuclear deal, as the existing treaty was set to expire in a “grave moment for international peace and security.”
The New START agreement will end Thursday, formally releasing both Moscow and Washington from a raft of restrictions on their nuclear arsenals.
“For the first time in more than half a century, we face a world without any binding limits on the strategic nuclear arsenals of the Russian Federation and the United States of America,” Guterres said in a statement.
The UN secretary-general added that New START and other arms control treaties had “drastically improved the security of all peoples.”
“This dissolution of decades of achievement could not come at a worse time — the risk of a nuclear weapon being used is the highest in decades,” he said, without giving more details.
Guterres urged Washington and Moscow “to return to the negotiating table without delay and to agree upon a successor framework.”
Russia and the United States together control more than 80 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads but arms agreements have been withering away.
New START, first signed in 2010, limited each side’s nuclear arsenal to 1,550 deployed strategic warheads — a reduction of nearly 30 percent from the previous limit set in 2002.
It also allowed each side to conduct on-site inspections of the other’s nuclear arsenal, although these were suspended during the Covid-19 pandemic and have not resumed since.
