Company comment
Standard Bank signal on loan relief needed reflects level of economic hardship
Bad debt due to lockdown will take as long to resolve as it will take the economy to recover
Standard Bank’s announcement on Monday that it had about R130bn in loans at end-September still requiring some sort of relief or restructuring reveals how tough things are in the economy.
In one of the ironies of the pandemic, the sharp reduction in interest rates means that indebted clients who managed to keep income at levels similar to what they had before the pandemic, are much better off now because the cost of servicing debt has plunged. The bank suggested this when describing the relative buoyancy of home-loan disbursements in the third quarter, which indicates how nuanced the economic recovery is...
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