News-Archive (Page 1)
The South African Reserve Bank left its repo rate unchanged at 5.5% on Thursday as expected, with concerns about a slowing economy off-setting the pressures from inflation, which is likely to stay outside its target band for longer than previously expected.
At its first policy meeting of 2012, the bank raised its inflation forecast, saying it expected inflation to be outside its 3-6% target range throughout 2012, with the recent depreciation of the rand being the main reason.
Thus the prime lending rate also stays at currently 9%, but the chances are very high, that it will be dropping after the next Reserve Bank meeting.
The inflation rate in South Africa was last reported at 6.1 percent and has thus left the corridor set by the Minister of Finance as to be between 3% and 6%.
On the back of a weak Rand it is further to be expected that the final quarter of 2011/2012 will see an inflation rate as high as 6.3%
From 1981 until 2010, the average inflation rate in South Africa was 10.00 percent reaching an historical high of 20.80 percent in January of 1986 and a record low of 0.10 percent in January of 2004.
Today the Monetary Committee of the Reserve Bank has reconvened for the first time in 2012 in order to discuss counter-measures as well as a possible chanhge of the Repo rate, which will then translate in a change of the prime lending rate.
Evita Bezuidenhout,the famous cabaretist based in Darling, spoke to the newspaper Die Burger on 3 January 2012 with regard to the prospects for South Africa in 2012:
"We won't have much of a government this year because they are fighting so much among themselves they haven't got time for much else. It is going to be a healthy year for South Africa, but we will all have to work hard at it to make it happen. It won't be given to us on a platter!"
On that note: we wish all a prosperous New Year 2012!
The ANC is to mark its centenary with an elaborate and expensive celebration in Bloemfontein, the city where it was founded.
The ANC, which was formed in 1912 to channel the opposition of blacks to white minority rule, has been South Africa's ruling party since the fall of apartheid in 1994.
According to ANC chairperson Baleka Mbeti, the main centenary celebration at the weekend will draw no fewer than 100 000 people and cost no less than R100m.
Forty-six heads of state will be among the 6 000 invited guests from neighbouring Zimbabwe and as far afield as Germany and India to converge on Bloemfontein, she said.
"All South Africans and people of the continent and the world are again invited to grace this auspicious occasion," the party said in a recent statement.
ANC veteran and anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela will be absent. The 94-year-old former president is reportedly too frail to travel.
Former and now Vice President of South Africa, Kgalema Motlanthe, must have inhaled to much christmas incense, when he declared the 27th of December 2011 yet another Public Holiday.
Due to the - untiumely - rule of a Monday being a Public Holiday, if a scheduled Public Holiday falls on a Sunday, he found that this year such Monday is also a scheduled Public Holiday and therefore the Tuesday must fall under the same rule.
In a time, where economic growth is as much needed as peace on christmas, he decided to please COSATU and to make even more enemies amongst the rows of employers, who are now - yet again - have to face a day of zero production, but a another day of time to think, where an increased GDP shall come from....
