Tag: inflation rate

Stokvels are on the move: moving from villages to cities, from beneath mattresses into savings accounts and investment instruments. As they move and evolve, their potential for growth and their ability to create wealth increases.

As you know, the threshold has increased by 7.6%. Upon investigation, it seems that the October Consumer Price Index (CPI) was used to increase the threshold. More significantly, the National Minimum Wage has gone up by 9.6% as well.

You don’t have to be an economist to notice that inflation is biting at the moment. In fact, you’ve probably felt it yourself, noticing how, every month, a little more of your salary goes into things like food and fuel. In fact, South Africa’s monthly inflation rate has consistently been above the upper limit of the Reserve Bank’s three to six percent target range since April this year, peaking at 7.8% in July. 

For banks, disruption has become business as usual. Besides the ever-changing customer expectations, banks are under pressure to defend their market share against increased competition and the digitisation of the financial services landscape by neo-banks and FinTechs.

South Africa continues to produce skilled professionals equipped with the means to drive the South African economy. However, in the older age groups, the number of graduate professionals committed to a career in South Africa is diminishing.

It’s that time again, early in the new year, when we are speculating as to what 2022 may hold, in this case for the property part of the South African economy. In a still-weak, albeit improved, economy with rising interest rates, property market fireworks don’t appear to be on the cards this year.

The macro environment has been deteriorating over the past few years and this has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis. As a result, the credit market has been characterised by deteriorating credit quality and credit spreads. The key credit cycle indicators that we look at confirms this market phenomena.

Welcome to the ‘new normal’, they say. You see, something’s always considered the ‘new normal’ until yet another ‘new normal’ comes along. Granted, at times, the ‘new normal’ does actually stick. However, most of the time, it’s just noise and like the doppler effect, it will soon fade away.