With both oil prices and the Russian ruble continuing to search for their respective floors, Kazakhstan’s economic maelstrom shows no signs of slowing. If anything, 2016 is shaping up to be worse than 2015: Not only has Kazakhstan’s tenge now lost over 50 percent of its value against the dollar since last August’s de-pegging, but the Economist Intelligence Unit is projecting the country will endure a recession for the first time since 1998.
All of this while the country’s megalith hydrocarbon project shows no signs of growing closer to completion, while the country shows no indications of enacting long-overdue political reform, and while septuagenarian President Nursultan Nazarbayev pushes into his second quarter-century leading the country.
