One of the things that makes guessing the direction of the dollar against other currencies impossible is that it requires fluency in "Fedspeak" — the impenetrable jargon of the Federal Reserve. Unlike SA, which has one central bank, the US has 12, known as the Federal Reserve System. Each has a president, and the Fed has a chair (currently Janet Yellen). On any given day, at least one of these officials will be talking Fedspeak to some or other gathering. Commentators who pretend to understand this then pronounce to the laity whether the speech was "hawkish" or "dovish", causing currencies like the rand to wildly weaken or strengthen. One of US President Donald Trump’s few sensible plans was to try switch the US to the more comprehensible central banking system of inflation targeting. In SA we had the reverse, with (presumably) President Jacob Zuma trying to remove inflation targeting from the Reserve Bank’s mandate by getting the public protector to sneak a clause into one of her r...

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