Consumer inflation moved further outside the Reserve Bank’s 3%-6% target range in October, as some economists had expected. The consumer price index increased 6.4% in October from a year earlier, Statistics SA said on Wednesday, after the 6.1% increase reported last month for September. Forecasts varied, with some economists calling for a rise of has high as 6.4%. The Bloomberg consensus was for a forecast of 6.2% and Trading Economics put it at 6.1%. The Reserve Bank announces its monetary policy committee’s decision on interest rates on Thursday, but it looks at inflation expectations for the next six months in its deliberations, so the CPI increase is unlikely to affect its decision. At previous meetings the Bank has said that although consumer inflation has consistently been higher than the target for most of this year, it seemed stable at those levels. The Bank is widely expected to leave the repo rate at 7%, with achingly slow local economic growth expected to outweigh interna...
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