At More Than 500%, Zimbabwe’s Ncube Sees Inflation Stabilizing

HARARE (Capital Markets in Africa)~ Zimbabwean inflation is beginning to stabilize, even with consumer prices increased more than 500% on an annual basis, Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube said.

Year-on-year inflation remains high, “but that’s expected, that happens when you liberalize a currency,” Ncube said Wednesday in an interview with Bloomberg Television at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

After a decade of using a basket of foreign currencies, including the South African rand and the U.S. dollar, Zimbabwe last year reintroduced its own tender. It has plummeted to 17.1950 per dollar since a 1:1 peg was removed in February.

The southern African nation’s statistics agency suspended publishing year-on-year inflation data after June, when monthly inflation peaked at 39.3%. It still releases the consumer price index, which shows annual costs rose 521% in December, the most since a hyperinflation episode in 2009. While monthly price growth has cooled, it was still at 16.6% in December, whereas Ncube said in February it could be close to zero by the end of 2019.

Still, investors can believe his government’s pledge to rein in inflation because they have “walked the talk,” he said.

“We said that month-on-month inflation is going to be stabilizing and going to be dropping, that’s what has been been happening,” Ncube said. “We believe that we are on our way to dealing with inflation. It will take time, but we are headed there.”

Source: Bloomberg Business News