Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/20780389.2021.1938532
H. Hollander, R. Havemann
ABSTRACT We evaluate South African financial stability policy from 2003 to 2013 – the country’s most significant credit boom and bust cycle. This cycle overlapped with both rising bank capital adequacy ratios and the global financial crisis of 2007/8. We use a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to identify South African Reserve Bank (SARB) interventions and run counterfactual policy scenarios. We document two instances of policy inaction. Our counterfactual scenarios suggest that, with the benefit of hindsight, the SARB took the correct steps to raise capital requirements during the credit boom, but could have persisted with raising capital requirements for longer (past 2004), and could have adopted a looser policy stance after the global financial crisis to mitigate the credit bust. Our findings reaffirm the importance of counter-cyclical action, the usefulness of bank capital as a buffer against unexpected shocks to build financial sector resilience, and the need for independent but close coordination between monetary and macroprudential policy. In addition, because of structural differences between household and firm credit, the SARB should consider buttressing the uniform countercyclical capital buffer with sector-specific capital requirements.
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Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/20780389.2021.1940490
Bradley Bordiss, J. Rossouw
On Saturday, the 29 May 2021, the sad news came that Vishnu Padayachee, a dear friend and mentor, had died after a year-long illness. Mahavishnu (Vishnu) Padayachee was born in Umkomaas and commenced his studies at the University of Durban-Westville. He completed a PhD in economics at the University of Natal in 1990. Vishnu was a key member of the ANC’s Macro-economic Research Group (MERG) which proposed a Structuralist and Post-Keynesian approach to economic policy, and which recognized effective demand failures and unemployment as key problems in South Africa. The ANC’s abandonment of this approach in favour of a neoliberal one disappointed him deeply. His long academic career began with a Junior Lectureship in economics at the University of Durban-Westville and ended with him becoming the holder of the Derek Schrier and Cecily Cameron Chair in Development Economics at the University of the Witwatersrand. He also held a lifetime Fellowship at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. and an honorary doctorate in economics conferred on him in 2018 by Rhodes University. As an academic and researcher, Vishnu was widely cited, being known for his research in economics, economic history, economic transformation, and development. He was the author or co-author of 10 books and monographs, numerous book chapters, and over a hundred journal articles. Vishnu regularly spoke at local and international conferences and made important contributions to public debates. Vishnu was not just an academic, and had many other interests and hobbies. He enjoyed, and wrote a book on cricket in South Africa. He was a book collector and dealer, and co-owner of the legendary Ike’s Books and Collectables in Durban. In 1996, Vishnu was appointed a non-executive Director of the SA Reserve Bank and served in this capacity for 12 years. This appointment further stimulated his interest developed in MERG and contributed to his vast knowledge of central banking in general and the SA Reserve Bank in particular. Future generations of scholars will continue to benefit from his work in this field. Economics is a discipline in which dogmas and articles of faith abound. Supervisors who can lift themselves above their own articles of faith are regrettably rare. Although Vishnu’s main intellectual influences were heterodox, especially Marx and Keynes, he had no difficulty supervising neo-classical scholars working on topics he found interesting. He did not just bring tolerant eclecticism to his supervisions, he bought immense energy and enthusiasm. After hearing of an archive that had not yet been plumbed by
{"title":"Professor Vishnu Padayachee, 1952–2021","authors":"Bradley Bordiss, J. Rossouw","doi":"10.1080/20780389.2021.1940490","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20780389.2021.1940490","url":null,"abstract":"On Saturday, the 29 May 2021, the sad news came that Vishnu Padayachee, a dear friend and mentor, had died after a year-long illness. Mahavishnu (Vishnu) Padayachee was born in Umkomaas and commenced his studies at the University of Durban-Westville. He completed a PhD in economics at the University of Natal in 1990. Vishnu was a key member of the ANC’s Macro-economic Research Group (MERG) which proposed a Structuralist and Post-Keynesian approach to economic policy, and which recognized effective demand failures and unemployment as key problems in South Africa. The ANC’s abandonment of this approach in favour of a neoliberal one disappointed him deeply. His long academic career began with a Junior Lectureship in economics at the University of Durban-Westville and ended with him becoming the holder of the Derek Schrier and Cecily Cameron Chair in Development Economics at the University of the Witwatersrand. He also held a lifetime Fellowship at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. and an honorary doctorate in economics conferred on him in 2018 by Rhodes University. As an academic and researcher, Vishnu was widely cited, being known for his research in economics, economic history, economic transformation, and development. He was the author or co-author of 10 books and monographs, numerous book chapters, and over a hundred journal articles. Vishnu regularly spoke at local and international conferences and made important contributions to public debates. Vishnu was not just an academic, and had many other interests and hobbies. He enjoyed, and wrote a book on cricket in South Africa. He was a book collector and dealer, and co-owner of the legendary Ike’s Books and Collectables in Durban. In 1996, Vishnu was appointed a non-executive Director of the SA Reserve Bank and served in this capacity for 12 years. This appointment further stimulated his interest developed in MERG and contributed to his vast knowledge of central banking in general and the SA Reserve Bank in particular. Future generations of scholars will continue to benefit from his work in this field. Economics is a discipline in which dogmas and articles of faith abound. Supervisors who can lift themselves above their own articles of faith are regrettably rare. Although Vishnu’s main intellectual influences were heterodox, especially Marx and Keynes, he had no difficulty supervising neo-classical scholars working on topics he found interesting. He did not just bring tolerant eclecticism to his supervisions, he bought immense energy and enthusiasm. After hearing of an archive that had not yet been plumbed by","PeriodicalId":54115,"journal":{"name":"Economic History of Developing Regions","volume":"36 1","pages":"122 - 123"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49367490","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/20780389.2021.1945436
C. Swanepoel, Philip T. Fliers
ABSTRACT The newly established South African Reserve Bank (SARB) was tasked to protect the currency by navigating the interwar gold standard, and, from March 1933, maintaining parity with the Pound Sterling. We find that South Africa’s exit from gold secured an unparalleled and rapid recovery from the Great Depression. South Africa’s exit was accompanied by an inextricable link of the SARB’s policy rate to the interest rate set by the Bank of England (BoE). This sacrifice of independent monetary policy allowed the SARB to fix the country’s exchange rate without impeding the flow of gold to London. The SARB fuelled the economy by reducing its policy rates and accumulating gold. Had South Africa not devalued, the country would have suffered a severe depression and persistent deflation. An alternative to the devaluation was for the SARB to pursue a cheap money strategy. By setting interest rates historically low, we find that South Africa could have achieved higher levels of economic growth, at the cost of higher inflation. Ultimately, South Africa’s unparalleled recovery can be ascribed to the devaluation; however the change in the SARB monetary policy and the bank’s control over the gold markets were of paramount importance.
{"title":"The fuel of unparalleled recovery: Monetary policy in South Africa between 1925 and 1936","authors":"C. Swanepoel, Philip T. Fliers","doi":"10.1080/20780389.2021.1945436","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20780389.2021.1945436","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The newly established South African Reserve Bank (SARB) was tasked to protect the currency by navigating the interwar gold standard, and, from March 1933, maintaining parity with the Pound Sterling. We find that South Africa’s exit from gold secured an unparalleled and rapid recovery from the Great Depression. South Africa’s exit was accompanied by an inextricable link of the SARB’s policy rate to the interest rate set by the Bank of England (BoE). This sacrifice of independent monetary policy allowed the SARB to fix the country’s exchange rate without impeding the flow of gold to London. The SARB fuelled the economy by reducing its policy rates and accumulating gold. Had South Africa not devalued, the country would have suffered a severe depression and persistent deflation. An alternative to the devaluation was for the SARB to pursue a cheap money strategy. By setting interest rates historically low, we find that South Africa could have achieved higher levels of economic growth, at the cost of higher inflation. Ultimately, South Africa’s unparalleled recovery can be ascribed to the devaluation; however the change in the SARB monetary policy and the bank’s control over the gold markets were of paramount importance.","PeriodicalId":54115,"journal":{"name":"Economic History of Developing Regions","volume":"36 1","pages":"213 - 244"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47862283","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/20780389.2021.1923399
C. Vermeulen
ABSTRACT The South African Reserve Bank (SARB) is one of only nine central banks around the world with private shareholders. This paper contributes to the understanding of this ownership arrangement by outlining the history and evolution of private shareholding in the SARB since its inception in 1921 to the present day. It considers the reasons for shares having been issued to establish the SARB, and changes in legislation which influenced the SARB’s ownership structure and the roles and responsibilities of the Board of Directors, shareholders and shareholder-elected directors. It also considers some earlier calls for the SARB to be nationalized. The historical overview shows that executive power has always rested with government appointees, while the government has gradually gained more control – relative to private shareholders – over the Board. This paper also confirms that – with respect to monetary policy – ownership of the SARB is purely notional. The SARB’s policy goals and executive powers are derived directly from the government and the Constitution, and neither the shareholders nor the directors appointed by shareholders have a say in the SARB’s mandate, its policy goals, or the conduct of monetary policy. The role of shareholders is limited to matters of corporate governance only.
{"title":"One hundred years of private shareholding in the South African Reserve Bank","authors":"C. Vermeulen","doi":"10.1080/20780389.2021.1923399","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20780389.2021.1923399","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The South African Reserve Bank (SARB) is one of only nine central banks around the world with private shareholders. This paper contributes to the understanding of this ownership arrangement by outlining the history and evolution of private shareholding in the SARB since its inception in 1921 to the present day. It considers the reasons for shares having been issued to establish the SARB, and changes in legislation which influenced the SARB’s ownership structure and the roles and responsibilities of the Board of Directors, shareholders and shareholder-elected directors. It also considers some earlier calls for the SARB to be nationalized. The historical overview shows that executive power has always rested with government appointees, while the government has gradually gained more control – relative to private shareholders – over the Board. This paper also confirms that – with respect to monetary policy – ownership of the SARB is purely notional. The SARB’s policy goals and executive powers are derived directly from the government and the Constitution, and neither the shareholders nor the directors appointed by shareholders have a say in the SARB’s mandate, its policy goals, or the conduct of monetary policy. The role of shareholders is limited to matters of corporate governance only.","PeriodicalId":54115,"journal":{"name":"Economic History of Developing Regions","volume":"36 1","pages":"245 - 263"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20780389.2021.1923399","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46595772","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/20780389.2021.1926232
E. Feingold, J. Fourie, Leigh Gardner
ABSTRACT This paper uses the South African objects in the National Numismatic Collection of the Smithsonian to tell a new material history of money in South Africa. In other parts of the continent, research about the currencies in use and how these changed over time have offered a new perspective on the impact of colonialism, commercialization, and the rise of state capacity. South Africa, and southern Africa more generally, has remained on the periphery of these debates. This paper begins to fill this gap. It shows that even in Africa’s most financially developed region, the process of establishing a stable national currency was long and halting, reflecting struggles over South Africa’s relationship with the global economy and the rise and fall of apartheid.
{"title":"A tale of paper and gold: The material history of money in South Africa","authors":"E. Feingold, J. Fourie, Leigh Gardner","doi":"10.1080/20780389.2021.1926232","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20780389.2021.1926232","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper uses the South African objects in the National Numismatic Collection of the Smithsonian to tell a new material history of money in South Africa. In other parts of the continent, research about the currencies in use and how these changed over time have offered a new perspective on the impact of colonialism, commercialization, and the rise of state capacity. South Africa, and southern Africa more generally, has remained on the periphery of these debates. This paper begins to fill this gap. It shows that even in Africa’s most financially developed region, the process of establishing a stable national currency was long and halting, reflecting struggles over South Africa’s relationship with the global economy and the rise and fall of apartheid.","PeriodicalId":54115,"journal":{"name":"Economic History of Developing Regions","volume":"36 1","pages":"264 - 281"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20780389.2021.1926232","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46815038","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/20780389.2021.1930709
J. Fourie
When Simon Groot died in 1688 on his Stellenbosch farm – leaving behind his wife, Gertrud Baumann, and their two daughters, aged 6 and 18 months – his probate inventory recorded the collection of household goods and farm implements that the family had owned at the time: some tin and iron equipment, a gun, and a wagon, to name but a few items. The inventory also lists the summer harvest of ten mudden rye and the livestock on the farm: one pig, two horses, twelve trek oxen, ten cattle and fifty-five sheep. Ownership of one enslaved, unnamed boy is recorded – but what is most remarkable about Groot’s inventory is the family’s credit network: despite their relatively humble portfolio of assets, they owed money to at least fifteen people – including a sizeable sum to the Dutch Reformed Church. In contrast to an earlier literature which suggested a mostly subsistence economy, research using these probate inventories and auction rolls has revealed the dense financial network of the eighteenth-century Cape Colony – a financial network underpinned, it must be emphasized, by the institution of slavery (Fourie and Swanepoel 2018). This fact – a thriving capitalist system blemished by exclusion and exploitation – would become characteristic of South Africa’s economic development into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The study of capitalism – the history of markets, entrepreneurship, trade, and innovation but also labour coercion, discrimination, and inequality – is back in vogue. There are at least two reasons for this. First, events in the present have forced social scientists to learn from the past. Macroeconomists, enamoured with rational expectations models, had predicted the end of the business cycle – that was, until the Great Recession of 2007 dashed those predictions. As Eichengreen (2012) reminds us, it is during such financial crises that policymakers turn to history for guidance. Furthermore, the rise of populist movements across the globe during the 2010s has warranted comparisons with earlier eras that also witnessed severe levels of societal inequality (Piketty and Zucman 2014). Forms of exclusion along race and gender identities persist – exclusions that have deep historic roots (Wanamaker 2017). And research on the Spanish flu of 1918 is in high demand in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic (Arthi and Parman 2021). A second reason for the rising interest in the study of economic history is the availability of new methods and sources (Mitchener 2015). This is especially applicable to the developing world, where conventional historical sources are often inaccessible or
西蒙·格鲁特于1688年在他的斯泰伦博斯农场去世，留下了他的妻子格特鲁德·鲍曼和两个分别为6岁和18个月大的女儿。他的遗嘱清单记录了当时家庭拥有的家庭用品和农具:一些锡和铁设备，一支枪，一辆马车，等等。清单上还列出了十只黑麦的夏季收成和农场上的牲畜:一头猪，两匹马，十二头牛，十头牛和五十五只羊。一个被奴役的无名男孩的所有权被记录了下来，但格鲁特的清单中最引人注目的是这个家庭的信用网络:尽管他们的资产组合相对不起眼，但他们至少欠了15个人的钱，其中包括荷兰归正教会的一大笔钱。与早期文献提出的主要是自给自足的经济相比，使用这些遗嘱清单和拍卖卷的研究揭示了18世纪开普殖民地的密集金融网络——必须强调的是，这一金融网络是由奴隶制制度支撑的(Fourie and Swanepoel 2018)。这一事实- -被排斥和剥削玷污的繁荣的资本主义制度- -将成为南非进入19和20世纪的经济发展的特点。对资本主义的研究——市场、创业、贸易和创新的历史，以及劳动强制、歧视和不平等的历史——重新流行起来。这至少有两个原因。首先，当前发生的事件迫使社会科学家从过去学习。痴迷于理性预期模型的宏观经济学家曾预测到商业周期的结束——直到2007年的大衰退打破了这些预测。正如Eichengreen(2012)提醒我们的那样，正是在此类金融危机期间，政策制定者才会从历史中寻求指导。此外，2010年代民粹主义运动在全球范围内的兴起，值得与早期社会严重不平等的时代进行比较(Piketty和Zucman 2014)。种族和性别认同的排斥形式依然存在——这种排斥有着深刻的历史根源(Wanamaker 2017)。在Covid-19大流行之后，对1918年西班牙流感的研究需求量很大(Arthi和Parman 2021)。对经济史研究越来越感兴趣的第二个原因是新方法和新来源的可用性(Mitchener 2015)。这尤其适用于发展中国家，在这些国家，传统的历史资料往往难以获得
{"title":"Macroeconomic history in South Africa: The South African Reserve Bank centennial special issue","authors":"J. Fourie","doi":"10.1080/20780389.2021.1930709","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20780389.2021.1930709","url":null,"abstract":"When Simon Groot died in 1688 on his Stellenbosch farm – leaving behind his wife, Gertrud Baumann, and their two daughters, aged 6 and 18 months – his probate inventory recorded the collection of household goods and farm implements that the family had owned at the time: some tin and iron equipment, a gun, and a wagon, to name but a few items. The inventory also lists the summer harvest of ten mudden rye and the livestock on the farm: one pig, two horses, twelve trek oxen, ten cattle and fifty-five sheep. Ownership of one enslaved, unnamed boy is recorded – but what is most remarkable about Groot’s inventory is the family’s credit network: despite their relatively humble portfolio of assets, they owed money to at least fifteen people – including a sizeable sum to the Dutch Reformed Church. In contrast to an earlier literature which suggested a mostly subsistence economy, research using these probate inventories and auction rolls has revealed the dense financial network of the eighteenth-century Cape Colony – a financial network underpinned, it must be emphasized, by the institution of slavery (Fourie and Swanepoel 2018). This fact – a thriving capitalist system blemished by exclusion and exploitation – would become characteristic of South Africa’s economic development into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The study of capitalism – the history of markets, entrepreneurship, trade, and innovation but also labour coercion, discrimination, and inequality – is back in vogue. There are at least two reasons for this. First, events in the present have forced social scientists to learn from the past. Macroeconomists, enamoured with rational expectations models, had predicted the end of the business cycle – that was, until the Great Recession of 2007 dashed those predictions. As Eichengreen (2012) reminds us, it is during such financial crises that policymakers turn to history for guidance. Furthermore, the rise of populist movements across the globe during the 2010s has warranted comparisons with earlier eras that also witnessed severe levels of societal inequality (Piketty and Zucman 2014). Forms of exclusion along race and gender identities persist – exclusions that have deep historic roots (Wanamaker 2017). And research on the Spanish flu of 1918 is in high demand in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic (Arthi and Parman 2021). A second reason for the rising interest in the study of economic history is the availability of new methods and sources (Mitchener 2015). This is especially applicable to the developing world, where conventional historical sources are often inaccessible or","PeriodicalId":54115,"journal":{"name":"Economic History of Developing Regions","volume":"36 1","pages":"117 - 121"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48752011","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/20780389.2021.1943347
Lloyd Melusi Maphosa, A. Ehlers, J. Fourie, E. Kerby
ABSTRACT The adoption of limited liability in the nineteenth century is considered to have boosted economic growth and expanded capital markets in Europe and North America. Despite similar legal changes in frontier markets such as South Africa, very few attempts have been made to analyse the economic effects thereof. After the Cape Joint Stock Company Act No. 25 of 1892 there was an upsurge in new joint stock companies in the Cape Colony, but little is known about the people who financed them. This study is an enquiry into who they were. Using a list of 6883 shareholders from 263 companies, we show that the Cape’s sources of private capital were a diverse group of people. Unlike previous studies, we find that most capital came from the middle class at the Cape and very little from foreign investors. The paper contributes to our understanding of early financial developments on the frontier and the evolution of capitalism at the Cape. It also contributes broadly to the economic and business history of the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Cape.
{"title":"The growth and diversity of the Cape private capital market, 1892–1902","authors":"Lloyd Melusi Maphosa, A. Ehlers, J. Fourie, E. Kerby","doi":"10.1080/20780389.2021.1943347","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20780389.2021.1943347","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The adoption of limited liability in the nineteenth century is considered to have boosted economic growth and expanded capital markets in Europe and North America. Despite similar legal changes in frontier markets such as South Africa, very few attempts have been made to analyse the economic effects thereof. After the Cape Joint Stock Company Act No. 25 of 1892 there was an upsurge in new joint stock companies in the Cape Colony, but little is known about the people who financed them. This study is an enquiry into who they were. Using a list of 6883 shareholders from 263 companies, we show that the Cape’s sources of private capital were a diverse group of people. Unlike previous studies, we find that most capital came from the middle class at the Cape and very little from foreign investors. The paper contributes to our understanding of early financial developments on the frontier and the evolution of capitalism at the Cape. It also contributes broadly to the economic and business history of the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Cape.","PeriodicalId":54115,"journal":{"name":"Economic History of Developing Regions","volume":"36 1","pages":"149 - 174"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20780389.2021.1943347","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44455029","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/20780389.2021.1927697
Bradley Bordiss, V. Padayachee, J. Rossouw
ABSTRACT The SA Reserve Bank (SARB) was created as a result of an earlier gold standard monetary crisis that unfolded after World War I. From 1919, South Africa nominally maintained the gold standard, but not the conversion of banknotes into gold. This article seeks to discuss the SARB's views on the gold standard controversy, and to highlight the different attitudes of the first two governors, Clegg and Postmus, attitudes that have not previously been examined in the literature. It will also discuss the way in which the Bank of England misled Clegg, and how the views expressed privately differed from those in the SARB's Ordinary General Meeting (OGM) documentation. This paper considers the irony that Clegg was selected from the ranks of the Bank of England and was loyal to Threadneedle Street, but defended a monetary policy which aided one of the biggest constituencies of the Afrikaner Nationalist Party – Afrikaner farmers. By contrast, Postmus was previously at the Nederlandsche Bankvoor Zuid-Afrika, and supported the National Party position that South Africa should return to, and remain on, a gold standard independent of Britain. Despite this, Postmus's policy turned out to be disastrous for the mostly Afrikaner farmers affected by the 1931–1932 crisis.
南非储备银行(SARB)是在第一次世界大战后爆发的金本位货币危机后成立的，从1919年开始，南非名义上维持了金本位，但没有将纸币兑换成黄金。本文试图讨论SARB对金本位争议的看法，并强调前两位行长克莱格和波斯特马斯的不同态度，这些态度在以前的文献中没有被研究过。它还将讨论英格兰银行误导克莱格的方式，以及私下表达的观点与SARB普通股东大会(OGM)文件中的观点有何不同。本文认为，具有讽刺意味的是，克莱格是从英格兰银行(Bank of England)中挑选出来的，忠于针线街(Threadneedle Street)，但却捍卫了一项帮助南非白人民族主义党的最大选区之一——南非白人农民的货币政策。相比之下，波斯特马斯之前在荷兰中央银行任职，支持国民党的立场，即南非应该回归并保持独立于英国的金本位制。尽管如此，波斯特马斯的政策对受1931-1932年危机影响的大多数南非白人农民来说是灾难性的。
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Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/20780389.2021.1943348
R. Havemann
ABSTRACT Following the collapse of Saambou bank in February 2002, contagion rapidly spread amongst South African small and medium-sized banks. By the end of 2003, half of the country’s banks had deregistered. The paper constructs a unique monthly bank-level data set to show that the banks that failed were those with short-term liabilities from other financial institutions. An initial delay in providing liquidity to solvent banks in distress and raising interest rates may have exacerbated the crisis. The need for prompt, swift action echoes lessons from banking panics throughout history.
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Pub Date : 2021-04-16DOI: 10.1080/20780389.2021.1890579
M. E. Mata, L. Nunes, Mário Roldão
ABSTRACT The beginnings of the Portuguese Escudo Monetary Zone (EMZ) in 1961, to promote the economic integration of Portugal and its empire, coincide in time with Mundell’s seminal paper about optimum currency areas. If non-optimality was the cause of the EMZ’s demise, this would suggest that monetary unions are fragile achievements, with little prospect for survival. The EMZ turned out to be a short-lived experiment, with Angola and Mozambique building up large cumulative deficit positions offset by the sizeable cumulative surpluses of the mainland. A cobweb model using monthly observations for macroeconomic variables of these two territories describes a time divergent process caused by structural imbalances, as well as by the loan granting system. The EMZ was not an optimum currency area and was not sustainable in the long run. This is an historical experiment that is not without interest for the study of other monetary areas.
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