Economy

HARARE (Capital Markets in Africa) – Zimbabwe’s government said it’s ready to settle with global lenders, sell assets and make the difficult spending decisions needed for financial recovery. But with opposition protests against plunging living standards scheduled in cities nationwide, it’s in a race against time. In an exclusive interview with Bloomberg News on Thursday, Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube dismissed rapidly accelerating inflation as “wage compression” and warned the country will have to endure four more months…

JOHANNESBURG (Capital Markets in AfricA) – South Africa has not asked the International Monetary Fund for assistance and does not need it, the lender’s resident representative in the country said. The IMF doesn’t see a balance-of-payments problem in South Africa, which means there’s no need for IMF support, Montfort Mlachila said Thursday at a conference hosted by the Bureau for Economic Research in Johannesburg. “To tell you the truth we, by we I mean the institution, much prefer the…

LONDON (Capital Markets in Africa) – The escalating trade war between the U.S. and China is nudging the world economy toward its first recession in a decade with investors demanding politicians and central bankers act fast to change course. In the U.S. alone, the recession risk is “much higher than it needs to be and much higher than it was two months ago,” Lawrence Summers, a former U.S. Treasury secretary and a White House economic adviser…

LONDON (Capital Markets in Africa) – The global bond market is sounding the alarm that things won’t be able to carry on much longer before a recession strikes. Germany’s yield curve is now at its flattest since the financial crisis — and yields across the world are slumping to fresh lows — in a cacophony of signs that investors are growing increasingly pessimistic about the outlook for the world economy. Central banks from New Zealand…

CAIRO (Capital Markets in Africa) – It’s the fastest-growing economy in the Middle East and a darling among emerging-market investors, yet poverty has climbed and companies are struggling. As Egypt concludes a three-year International Monetary Fund program designed to help pull the Arab world’s most populous nation out of economic turmoil, the indicators shown in the following charts are a vivid snapshot of the disparities. Inflation is finally slowing, the budget deficit is being whittled…

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) – China took steps to limit weakness in the yuan, providing some stability to global financial markets in the wake of Monday’s rout, and said it won’t depreciate the currency to be competitive. The People’s Bank of China on Tuesday set the daily currency fixing stronger than analysts expected and announced the planned sale of yuan-denominated bonds in Hong Kong. The moves, which came after the U.S. labeled the country…

JOHANNESBURG (Capital Markets in Africa) – Fresh from being reappointed for another five years, South African Reserve Bank Governor Lesetja Kganyago made it clear that he will keep on pursuing his mandate of low inflation and suggested the current target band may even be too high. This comes after Kganyago and the central bank came under renewed criticism in recent months from labor unions and some senior members of the ruling party who want borrowing…