Really good video on central banks.
The Scene:
Interest is meant to represent the risk of lending money to someone else. Someone who has a steady job and a record of paying stuff on time is going to have less of a risk than a hobo on the street.
Enter in Coronachan and the whims of politicians with too much authority over people's lives:
Whatever your views on the virus or the lockdown, it represents a massive uncertainty.
What should happen
Massive increase in general risk, therefore interest rates should go up.
What happens instead:
Most central banks around the world drop interest rates.
A sort of okay video on everything but central banks. I'm just past halfway maybe he'll still get to it.
I'll troll a little bit less now because this is a more reasonable argument.
More specific to the SARB.
The SARB isn't a for profit business. Most of their profits go to government. So they operate like a non profit, or almost independent SOE. Even though technically they are not.
Risk vs reward doesn't apply.
They have a strict mandate to just manage inflation and they do this by controlling the interest rate.
This prevents fast growth, because they put the brakes on in good times and then arguably that makes the dip less extreme aswell. It flattens the curve if you will of economic cycles.
Risk vs. Reward aspect fall to the commercial banks. Now the problem here is creditworthiness is mostly backwards looking. They check payment history/affordability, and that you have a steady income.
It's to difficult to speculate on future economic conditions and whether a specific person might have a job next year before they give a homeloan.
They have control over the interest rates they charge.(it is somewhat limited by the NCA) but they can mostly offer prime plus or minus whatever they want.
This way the central bank works as the currency issuer. There needs to be a price attached to it otherwise it is useless paper, so we have interest.
And setting the interest rate with a inflation goal in mind is certainly not the worst option.
Maybe just a low flat rate would be better, like always 1 or 2%