Economy / General

Will we see rate hikes up the wazoo this year?

Local mortgage holders entered 2023 in a state of resignation, having soaked up no fewer than seven interest rate hikes in the preceding 13-months, sending the repo rate up from 3.5% to 7%. To make matter worse, many economists are warning of tough times ahead and refusing to rule out further central bank action to fight out-of-control inflation. The prevailing macroeconomic environment is making it difficult for consumers and the financial advisers handling their investment portfolios to figure out what comes next… Will we seek rate hikes up the wazoo this year, or something less frightening? PS: ‘up the wazoo’ is an idiom meaning ‘in large quantities’, and not something you scream at the Eskom board when you hear about permanent Stage 2-3 loadshedding.

Repo rate to rise but one in five think the rate should hold

PPS Investments: CPI for December 2022

Consumer price inflation increased by 7.2% year-on-year in December 2022, lower than the 7.4% year-on-year print in the previous month.

Forget that grey list, SA has bigger financial ‘fish’ to fry

As South Africans fret over whether or not the country is added to the global Financial Action Task Force (FATF) grey list, our regulatory authorities are hard at work to ensure the integrity of our financial system. The latest Financial Stability Review (FSR), published by the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) for the six months to end-October 2022, concludes that the domestic financial system [remains] resilient despite highly challenging global and domestic conditions. According to the SARB, “prudentially regulated domestic financial institutions remain resilient, partly owing to their ability to maintain adequate capital buffers to absorb the impact of shocks”. The central bank is confident that this outlook will remain unchanged for review’s 12-month forecast period, until end-November 2023.