LUKANYO MNYANDA: Is ready, steady central banking a good fit in the middle of a crisis?
If the saying that good central banking should be boring has credence, then the Reserve Bank has been doing a great job lately. Few will have been surprised by its decision on Thursday to keep interest rates unchanged. Even the split vote, 3-2 in favour of keeping the repo rate at 3.5%, was widely expected.
I can’t be sure if former Bank of England governor Mervyn King was first to set “boringness” as a noble goal for a central bank. It was 20 years ago before he’d even got the top job, when he declared in a speech (https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/speech/2000/monetary-policy-theory-in-practice.pdf) that “a successful central bank should be boring — rather like a referee whose success is judged by how little his or her decisions intrude into the game itself”...
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