Carte Blanche with Perry

Man holds up defaced Robert Mugabe street sign during one of the many protests to engulf Harare in 2016 - Photo Credit: Reuters 2016, was always going to be a tough year. The seeds had been sown years prior, with the economy manifestly displaying signs of distress. Inflationary data was negative coming off 2015, and tightening lending by banks all but pointed to a severely weakening liquidity situation that had largely remained restricted to business circles, and big-shot private investors. As the year wore on however, this crisis eventually blew-up and started affecting the individual Zimbabwean at a very micro level, where it hurts the most. Civil Service Bonuses With some commendable level of foresight, finance minister Patrick Chinamasa had announced early in 2015 that it was government`s considered view that bonus payments for civil servants was a luxury it could no longer sustain, and hence bonuses were to be scrapped. However, at an Independence Day speech just...

  RBZ Governor, John Mangudya   That the generality of Zimbabweans are associating the impending bond notes with the ill-fated Zim dollar is a pretty foregone conclusion. The memory of the ghosts of 2007-08 hyperinflation era still lingers fresh in the minds of people. Evidence of this comes in the form of panicked cash withdrawals from the country`s banking system, as the public attempts to hold onto as much of the greenback as they possibly can, in the face of a pointedly uncertain economic future for the country. In the seven years since the introduction of the multi-currency system, in spite of there being a basket of several currencies, the US dollar has remained the predominant currency in use, fulfilling the major functions of money in an economy i.e. store of value, unit of account, means for payment. Any deviation from the system that is seen to have stabilized the financial system was always going to be a hard sell. And with good reason too. No-one re...

Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe governor, Dr J.P Mangudya Dr Mangudya`s central bank peers the world over have gained a great deal of prominence over the years, as fiscal policy as an economic recovery tool has taken a back-seat at the expense of monetary policy. Subsequently, the clout of central bank governors globally has rapidly increased and in no small part, due tools such as Quantitative Easing that enables central bankers to create liquidity. Unfortunately, this is not quite the case with Zimbabwe`s Reserve Bank governor. Be that as it may, Dr Mangudya has tried to make the RBZ relevant in the current multi-currency era, which limits the possibility of conducting an independent monetary policy. The themes of the RBZ governor`s monetary policy statements (MPS) over the years, have largely centered around reform and structural transformation of the economy, and the current one proved to be no different. Dr Mangudya appears to have taken a cue from former White House economist,...