Tag: South African Reserve Bank (SARB)

The African National Congress (ANC) is imploding. The productive energies of private enterprise have long been suppressed under the party’s hegemonic rule. Policy uncertainty, and simply bad policy, has kept South Africa back from fulfilling its full economic potential.

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.

From 1995 to 2015, informal settlements increased by 650% and the current housing backlog has risen to 2.6 million houses. President Cyril Ramaphosa claims that the Expropriation Bill allows the government to 'expropriate land for public use, for use of our people'.

Sabinet introduces an integrated solution for streamlined access to Financial Regulatory Instruments as issued by the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) and the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA).

Interest rates have gone up several times in the last few months in South Africa, and it looks like they will keep rising for the foreseeable future. So, this begs the question: what are interest rates, why are they rising, and how do they affect you?

The South African Reserve Bank (SARB), historically finding its expression in the Currency and Banking Act of 1920, is today premised on section 224(1) of the Constitution. Has the Reserve Bank been acting constitutionally since its legal foundation changed? Has it been protecting the value of the Rand in the interest of balanced and sustainable economic growth as required? How would the Reserve Bank meet its constitutional objective?

The South African Reserve Bank (SARB) recently announced their intention to declare cryptocurrency as a financial product, which is in line with current worldwide trends as well as the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA) which published a draft declaration of crypto assets as financial products in 2020.

Twenty months ago, the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) published commentary unintentionally implying that institutional investors – the custodians of retirement funds – were suddenly allowed to place all their assets offshore, from a prior limit of 30%.

Equity markets have been under considerable selling pressure in 2022, as investors anticipate that stubbornly high inflation will cause central banks to raise short-term interest rates multiple times this year. At the same time, expectations for global economic growth have been revised downwards, following further disruptions to global supply chains on the back of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s strict COVID-19 lockdown measures.

The South African Reserve Bank increased the repo rate by 50 basis points to 4.75%, after it was previously agreed at 25bps during the May policy meeting due to the declining Rand exchange, consumers are in for a tough time. When the repo rate goes up, the lending rate goes up and the consumers' pockets are affected.