Tag: monetary policy

It’s a new year but the global inflation debate continues to rage. Few things are as important for longer-term market behaviour as inflation; so this is important stuff, but also difficult since the big inflation shifts of the past 60 years (first up, then down, then way down) were largely unexpected.

Major central banks have combined with structural trends (slowing developed market population growth, globalisation, and technological innovation) to almost eradicate developed market inflation volatility over the past 50 years or so.

Much has been written about the uniqueness of 2020 and all the changes and uncertainties that have come with it. What started as a localised and isolated health scare, very soon spread to a global pandemic. Despite fatality numbers being relatively modest as pandemics go, the uncertainty about the disease, and its transmission and propagation, caused an extreme leadership response.

Like a good Hollywood thriller, the US election kept us in suspense all week with plenty of plot twists and turns. Billions of people around the world spent days glued to their screens, as the vote count was drawn out by a high voter turnout and a large increase in mail-in ballots.

The South African Reserve Bank (Sarb) Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) kept interest rates steady at 3.5% at the scheduled September 2020 interest rate-setting meeting despite downwardly revised growth and inflation views. This decision tied in with the view of 15 out of the 25 analysts surveyed by Reuters, while we were one of the ten favouring a 25-basis point cut.

The idea of American Exceptionalism has been a favourite rhetorical device of US presidents since the days of John F. Kennedy. It goes beyond conveying the sense that the country is richer and more powerful than other countries, but also that its unique culture and historical path render its destiny superior.

Following the South African Reserve Bank’s (SARB) decision to cut its lending rate by 0.25%, we will be reducing our prime lending rate to 7% from 7.25% with effect from Friday 24 July. The recent FNB/BER Consumer Confidence Index revealed an alarming but understandable slump in confidence, which has not been seen since 1985.

A sharp fall in the rate of consumer price inflation has defanged what was initially paraded as 'aggressive' monetary policy action intended to stimulate the floundering economy. Given a muted inflation outlook, and the depressed economic setting, the question is not if the South Africa’s Reserve Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) will cut interest rates this week, but rather by how much?

The world is facing one of its gravest crises in recent memory as it stares down COVID-19 and the wealth management industry has a key role to play by steadying the investment ship and navigating investors’ safely through this storm.

South African investors are still absorbing the twin blows of being downgraded by Moody’s into junk territory and, just four days later, the expected Fitch decision to take the South African sovereign debt rating down a further notch into junk territory.