EDITORIAL: South Africa damned with faint praise
Fitch might have left its rating unchanged, but that doesn’t mean it can’t see hope evaporating
19 July 2023 - 06:00
To read Fitch Ratings agency’s pallid review of South Africa is to wonder why it didn’t decide to downgrade the country’s BB− rating further or switch the outlook from “stable” to “negative”. Perhaps Fitch affirmed our rating because, at three notches into junk status, all the country’s shortcomings are already priced in.
Even so, Fitch expects the budget and current account deficits to widen, the public debt ratio to climb from about 72% to 77% of GDP by 2026 (well above the “BB” median of 56%), and real GDP growth to average below 1% over the medium term. ..
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