{"id":65112,"date":"2014-11-14T13:08:50","date_gmt":"2014-11-14T13:08:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/4cd.e16.myftpupload.com\/?p=65112"},"modified":"2014-11-14T13:08:50","modified_gmt":"2014-11-14T13:08:50","slug":"agi-fights-bog-policy-rate-hike","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/?p=65112","title":{"rendered":"AGI fights BoG over policy rate hike"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Association of Ghana Industries (AGI) has raised concerns over the increase of the Bank of Ghana&#8217;s monetary policy rate.<\/p>\n<p>The association fears the increase will have a negative impact on lending rates in the country.<\/p>\n<p>According to AGI, its findings over the period have revealed that the prime rate has not improved lending to consumers.<\/p>\n<p>The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of the Bank of Ghana (BoG) on Wednesday increased the monetary policy rate by 200<br \/>\nbasis point from 19 percent to 21 percent, as part of moves to tame inflation, which is currently at 16.9 percent.<\/p>\n<p>The AGI says even though the capital reserve requirement for commercial banks has been reduced from 11 percent to 10<br \/>\npercent it does not really translate into a decline in the base lending rates.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking to Citi Business News President of AGI James Asare Agyei said BOG will have to do more to ensure commercial banks<br \/>\ndo not pass on the increase to consumers.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat AGI will want to ask is that the Bank of Ghana puts in mechanisms to ensure that the commercial banks do not pass<br \/>\non the increase in the prime rate to lenders.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>According to him &#8216;over years a lot more people are not able to draw any sought of relationship between prime rate, lending<br \/>\nrate, inflation and other macroeconomic indicators and in most cases when prime rate goes up banks are quick in adjusting<br \/>\ntheir lending rate. However when prime rate is decreased or comes down we don\u2019t see that corresponding hurriedness in<br \/>\nensuring that interest rate comes down&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThese are things that need to be addressed and I think that as a country if we want to see our industry grow, if we want<br \/>\nto see our manufacturing sector which could be the largest employing unit thrive, then definitely there should be some<br \/>\nmechanism or some process of the supervising Bank (BOG) ensuring that the commercial banks don\u2019t have a field day, but are<br \/>\nsupporting the productive sectors of our economy.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>By: Norvan Acquah &#8211; Hayford\/citifmonline.com\/Ghana<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Association of Ghana Industries (AGI) has raised concerns over the increase of the Bank of Ghana&#8217;s monetary policy rate. The association fears the increase will have a negative impact on lending rates in the country. According to AGI, its findings over the period have revealed that the prime rate has not improved lending to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":37228,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[4],"class_list":["post-65112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health","tag-st-augustines-college"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=65112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65112\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/37228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=65112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=65112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=65112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}