What exactly is happening in our economy at the moment? With the drastic slides in fuel prices, one tends to think that everything is dropping in the wrong direction. However, some good news came a fortnight ago when The SA Reserve Bank left the repo rate unchanged at 5.5%, governor Gill Marcus announced at the end of September. In addition to this, the prime rate will stay at 8.5%.
The word from economists is that they expected the South African Reserve Bank to be cautious and not to trim interest rates further as a result of market volatility prevailing partly on the back of the Marikana crisis.
In its previous meeting, the MPC rang a surprise 0.5 percentage point interest cut, which brought much needed relief to many economic actors, mainly heavily indebted consumers.
