SOUTH AFRICA

SOUTH AFRICA - Report 16 Jan 2020

The South African Reserve Bank’s (SARB) Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) voted to cut the benchmark interest rate by 25 basis points from 6.5% to 6.25%, and therefore the prime lending rate from 10% to 9.75%, during its first sitting of the year. Prior to this, the last time the MPC had made an ad...

SOUTH AFRICA - Report 13 Jan 2020

The African National Congress (ANC) anniversary celebrations known as "The January 8" celebrations, during which the ANC delivers its annual statement that is essentially the "state of the party address", took place on Saturday, January 11, 2020. The January 8 statements have their origin in the ...

SOUTH AFRICA - Report 13 Dec 2019

The South African economy is once again being sabotaged by Eskom. This is because on top of the substantial financial burden the state owned entity (SOE) has been placing on the fiscus, Eskom resumed its infamous scheduled power cuts, normally referred to as “load shedding”, in the past week. Wha...

SOUTH AFRICA - Report 05 Dec 2019

Today the South African Reserve Bank released the latest current account data that shows the country’s current account deficit narrowed in the third quarter of 2019 - falling from R208.7 billion during the second quarter of 2019 to R190.3 billion in the third quarter, a narrowing of R18.3 billion...

SOUTH AFRICA - Report 03 Dec 2019

The previous quarterly GDP data by Stats SA revealed that South Africa had avoided a second consecutive H1 technical recession, as real GDP growth recovered by 3.2% q/q (upwardly adjusted from 3.1%) in the second quarter, from a contraction of 3.1% q/q during the first quarter of 2019. However, t...

SOUTH AFRICA - Report 21 Nov 2019

The South African Reserve Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) decided to keep the repo rate unchanged at its final meeting of 2019, leaving the benchmark interest rate at 6.5% and the prime interest rate at 10%, ending the year with only with one change in the repo rate in July 2019. Three mem...

SOUTH AFRICA - Report 15 Nov 2019

The embattled state-owned entity (SOE) South African Airways (SAA) is on the brink of collapse. It is understood that SAA desperately needs around R2 billion in order to fund its operations until the end of the current financial year, but Finance Minister Tito Mboweni has made it clear on several...

SOUTH AFRICA - Report 13 Nov 2019

It is common knowledge that South Africa’s economy has been struggling for some time now, and the country’s chronic unemployment problem has only worsened, with unemployment rates perpetually recording new highs. The unemployment rate currently stands at 29.1% (Q3 2019), registering the highest r...

SOUTH AFRICA - Report 07 Nov 2019

Following last year’s inaugural Investment Conference initiated and headed by President Ramaphosa, South Africa’s second Investment Conference, dubbed “Accelerating economic growth by building partnerships” came to its conclusion today. The previous year’s Conference came on the back of the Presi...