I ordered a few boxes of pizza today, and the total bill was 3200 SDG. That's close to about $55. Imagine if you suddenly have to pay thousands of bucks for a few boxes of pizza, that would be madness for locals. Sudan has really been hit with bad, uncontrollable inflation that spirals up by two digit percentages every year. I should mention that the government thinks printing more money is going to solve the sky-high (at least for local residsnts) bread and gas prices. Which is causing shortages of those items to the point that keep selling out quickly. (I felt my share of those.) Before 2019, there wasn't a banknote printed larger than 50 SDG. And all of a sudden, I start seeing 100 and 500 SDG banknotes printed in large batches, what in the world is going to back the value of this currency? Nobody is going to buy SDG bonds.
Speculators aren't helping improve this situation, just as with any other inflated currency. They keep shorting the Sudanese Pound and costing the central bank a lot of money, since in the Forex market, when somebody wins, someone else on the other side loses. These's even a crackdown on people who are holding US dollars you can read about here:
https://allafrica.com/stories/202006190164.htmlInflation's up to 114% according to that link. Considering how it's been climbing up thr last several months, I don't expect it to get better at all in the future. This is part of the reason I started accumulating bitcoins, because it is immune to inflation. I just can't buy anything here with it.
And yet, the USD/SDG exchange rate is stuck at 55 since Feburary (and I also felt my share of price hikes when that happened). Doesn't inflation also cause exchange rates to increase, in an inflationary way?
The part of the exchange price being stuck in one point is the biggest scam of the century because its not stuck what the central bank is doing is to force it at that level by all means necessary and one of those ways is the criminalising of those holding the USD the moment the government removes all of those controls, the local currency will fall so hard that the inflation you are currently seeing will be a child's play. Now the managers of the economy especially the central banks are not foolish and when it comes to addressing inflation of the entire economy, it goes beyond basic economics that we have come to learn either in high school or at the university level.