The Reserve Bank’s shabby treatment of VBS is another the reason why the bank should be restored to the people to whom it belongs.
12 March 2018
The Reserve Bank’s decision to place VBS under curatorship is sharp reminder that the reserve bank as an institution has no appetite to see the financial sector transformed and that its lack of accountability remains poisonous for poor people and black businesses.
The lack of political will by the ANC to correct the troubling legacy of compromise and their weak negotiations strategy during the CODESA negotiations is disconcerting. Prior to the adoption of the Constitution various commentators and intellectuals, including Dr Chris Stals, the former Apartheid governor of the Reserve Bank, who served as a governor between 1989 and 1999 wanted to take the bank away from the new government after they had used it to bail out and build white banks for themselves.
They argued that it should not favour certain groups in the society such as black farmers, black industrialists and black workers. This despite the fact that the current white owned banks are what they are because they were supported by the apartheid state.
They argued that any intervention in the market should be through inflation-targeting using interest rates to control inflation and not through administrative controls e.g. price and rent controls.