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BoG review developments in the economy



By: Fred Yaw Sarpong
 
The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of the Bank of Ghana (BoG) has started reviewing the developments in the economy, and will announce to the general public tomorrow Wednesday 2 April, 2014 the results.
The 60th regular meetings of MPC, led by the Governor, Dr. Kofi Wampah will also end with a decision on the appropriate positioning of the Bank’s Policy Rate.
The policy rate is the rate at which the central bank does overnight lending to universal banks in the country. Both the universal banks set their respective base lending rates to their customers based on the BoG policy rate.
Bank of Ghana will also inform the public the state of the measures put in place some few months ago by the central bank to address the difficulties in the economy, especially the state of the Ghana Cedi against the major currencies like the Dollar and the Pounce.
The committee will certainly give detail of the performance of the economy and this will include the country’s fiscal deficit, whether good or bad; inflationary trend based on the central bank’s statistics and as well as our Ghana’s import and export.
As part of the measures put in place by the central bank, the government directed all Ministries Departments and Agencies (MDAs) in the country not sign any contract in foreign currencies, especially quoting the US Dollar.
Also, the regulator of the banking industry was having discussion with Visa and Mastercard in order to allow the cards to handle Ghana Cedi.
Bank of Ghana made the public understood that, it had gone a long way with the discussion and hoping that something better would emanate from the discussion.
The bank’s measures were to ensure that Visa and Mastercard settle in this country.
The explanation was that the banks who provide services in Visa and Mastercard would have to settled in local or domestic currency, using the GH Link put in place by the central bank. The banks mention includes GCB, GT Bank, Zenith, Ecobank and among others.
One of the US Dollar operating areas, which the central bank considered as a critical area to stabilize the Cedi depreciation was the dollar black market operations scattered around the country.
The central bank believes that in order to control the continue depreciation of the Ghana’s cedi, the circulation and transaction of businesses in the dollar currency have to be control also.
The bank said identifying the black market is one of the few measures to limit access to trading in foreign currency (the dollar), and rather make the cedi more acceptable in all transaction businesses than the US Dollar.
This it said would help control transaction of businesses in US Dollar in order to curb the falling standard of the cedi.
These are some of the few measures put in place by the bank and it’s expected to inform Ghanaians the outcome of these measures.





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