South Africa Central Bank Shifts to ‘Wait and See’ After Covid-19 Response
- Central bank sees gradual normalization of key interest rate
- Monetary policy alone can’t delivery prosperity, bank says
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South Africa’s central bank has shifted to a “wait and see” strategy as it expects the benchmark interest rate to remain low after aggressive monetary-policy easing in the first half of the year to counter the economic damage wrought by the coronavirus pandemic.
“While the initial Covid-19 shock clearly justified a forceful response,” policy is once again more data dependent with the rate either cut by smaller increments or left unchanged in the second half of the year, the Reserve Bank said Tuesday in its six-monthly Monetary Policy Review.