The Vice President of IMANI Africa, Bright Simons, has renewed concerns over the sustainability of Ghana’s GoldBod model, detailing that the country’s gold gamble is one price drop away from economic crisis.
Bright Simons argued that the GoldBod model continues to impose high structural costs on the economy despite government efforts to reduce the cost of acquiring foreign exchange through gold purchases.
Mr Simons, in his post, cited findings from a recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) report, which he said confirmed his longstanding concerns about the economic implications of GoldBod’s operating model.
According to Bright Simons, Ghana is heavily dependent, macro-fiscally speaking, on the price of gold staying at record highs, which is undeniable.
He detailed that Ghana’s dependency on gold could well be the biggest risk to the country’s recovery from a disastrous debt crisis in 2022.
Bright Simons detailed that a gold price shock scenario suggests that a 30% correction would wipe out roughly $1.65 billion from the BoG’s gold holdings and stretch the GoldBod operational model to breaking point.
He noted that the IMF’s stress test shows that at a 45% decline (to $2,283/oz), with gold at 50% of reserves, BoG’s equity will fall to -9.0% of GDP.
Bright Simons highlighted that for all of Ghanaians’ sake, gold prices had better hang up there in the skies.
In a post on X on Wednesday, August 5, Bright Simons wrote, “1. I have been on the case of GoldBod for a while.
2. It is a super-agency created by the Ghanaian government last year to buy all the gold from artisanal and small-scale mines (as well as 30% of the output of large-scale mines) in the country.
3. Initially, its trading funds were advanced by the Bank of Ghana (BoG) to its super-aggregator in local currency (Cedis). Going forward, the Finance Ministry/National Treasury has been handed the baton from the BoG to fund GoldBod’s 2 super-aggregators.
4. A recent IMF report confirmed longstanding concerns about structural economic losses in GoldBod’s model. In 2025 alone, the BoG’s cost margin for each dollar of forex inflow in the GoldBod model was ~$0.17 on average (or $1.7 billion in aggregate). The govt says this cost has dropped to below $0.12 and it intends to bring it even lower, under $0.05. (Note: the cost of “sterilisation”, as explained below, is not included in all these calculations.)
5. At any rate, the government has long argued that the benefits of the policy in the form of a stable currency (with implications for inflation and interest rates) far outweigh the costs.
6. The question is whether these “benefits” are due mostly to the hike in gold prices and thus would have manifested anyway without the GoldBod.
7. Whilst that debate is unsettled, the fact that Ghana is heavily dependent, macro-fiscally speaking, on the price of gold staying at record highs is undeniable.
8. As you can see in the attached charts, that dependency/over-exposure could well be the biggest risk to the country’s recovery from a disastrous debt crisis in 2022.
9. I estimate that Ghana ranks first among similarly hyper-exposed countries because the vulnerability is structural and institutional, rather than just compositional.
10. The key issue is the extreme intertwining of currency stability policy with gold volume performance. The plan to build 15 months of import cover reserves based on state-controlled gold exports is a clear sign of this excessive entanglement.
11. The strategy has also led to “sterilisation” costs (i.e. an effort to prevent the Cedi injections used to buy artisanal gold from stoking inflation) approaching 3% of GDP.
12. In the midst of all this, the BoG’s equity has swung from positive $1bn at the end of 2021 to negative ~$8bn at the end of 2025.
13. Back to the gold price shock scenario: our modelling suggests that a 30% correction would wipe out roughly $1.65 billion from the BoG’s gold holdings and stretch the GoldBod operational model to breaking point.
14. The IMF’s stress test shows that at a 45% decline (to $2,283/oz), with gold at 50% of reserves, BoG’s equity will fall to -9.0% of GDP.
15. A fragile central bank is the last thing to take into a fiscal stress scenario. For all our sakes, gold prices better hang up there in the skies. Like the sun above Gibeon in the biblical days of Joshua”.
See the post below:
1. I have been on the case of GoldBod for a while.
— Bright Simons (@BBSimons) August 5, 2026
2. It is a super-agency created by the Ghanaian government last year to buy all the gold from artisanal and small-scale mines (as well as 30% of the output of large-scale mines) in the country.
3. Initially, its trading funds… pic.twitter.com/lwKX5iVsRb
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