Africa-Press – Angola. The BNA kept the Basic Interest Rate at 20 percent, at the end of the monthly meeting of the Monetary Policy Committee, in a decision that the central bank governor declared to be related to the expectation of an accumulated inflation of 18 percent this year, making the positive rate.
José de Lima Massano read a communiqué also announcing the maintenance of the Permanent Facility for the Provision of Liquidity Interest Rate at 25 percent, the Interest Rate of the Permanent Facility for Absorption of Liquidity at 15 percent and the Reserve Ratios Mandatory at 22 percent.
In another decision, the BNA relaxes the foreign exchange position limit of commercial banks, from 5.0 to 10 percent.
These decisions, said the governor, are taken due to the uncertainties and risks that prevail in the internal and external context, despite the observation of a more favorable behavior of the national economy, based on data released by the National Institute of Statistics (INE) in February, pointing for a decelerated variation of the National Consumer Price Index by 0.23 percentage points, settling at 1.77 percent, while the homologous rate was 27.28 percent.
“The reduction in inflation was essentially influenced by the food core whose contribution, in year-on-year terms, went from 12.53 percent to 12.35 percent in February, as the maintenance of adequate levels of liquidity and the contained growth of the monetary mass has contributed to contain the evolution of prices in the economy”, he said.
The monetary base in national currency registered a monthly expansion of 2.98 percent in February, and a contraction of 2.93 percent year-on-year. In turn, monetary aggregates in national currency contracted 0.42 percent in February and 0.23 percent throughout this year, according to data presented yesterday by the governor of the BNA.
José de Lima Massano announced that the “stock” of credit to the economy in national and foreign currency, expressed in kwanzas, expanded by 0.94 percent in February, reaching 4.58 billion kwanzas, the which led to an accumulated contraction in the year 2022 of 1.32 percent and an expansion of 3.31 percent in the last 12 months.
Appreciation of the kwanzas
“The foreign exchange market continues to function efficiently and, in February, commercial banks purchased a total of 750 million US dollars from the market, a decrease of 14.29 percent compared to the 875.26 million acquired in one month. before, noted the governor.
The fact that the national currency continues to appreciate against the main international currencies, both in real and nominal terms, is a reflection of the substantial improvement in its fundamentals, namely the terms of trade, oil yields and purchasing power parity.
International reserves at the end of February this year stood at 15.87 billion dollars, representing a coverage of 10.44 months of imports of goods and services, against 16.17 billion registered in January this year.
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