By #MondayBlues had long inserts which fought dishonesty and lies that they were being peddled by the RBZ over foreign currency shortages, in fact these were just mere insults to basic intelligence, but the governor seems to have sobered up now.
For the first time ever, he did not insult our intelligence that the last $200 million bond notes injected were all being hoarded across the border but in fact acknowledged the real challenge that we do not have foreign currency, which is rather a result not a cause of the pandemic.
This is the truth yours truly wanted him to preach when he sought to address the crisis. Now the next thing before injecting a fresh $300 million of painted papers, he has to be more honest about empty Nostro accounts, and how we are printing local digital currency.
How did Zimbabwe (FCA )bank accounts go bankrupt? since the Biti era we have been all using real foreign currency accounts if there were no shadowy Zim dollar accounts, how did the Nostro balances finally depleted?
When the multi currency regime was introduced, we had enough in our Nostro account, in fact it was all at 1:1.
This is the honesty that builds a nation, before they try and close a hole, which they only know how deep it goes, with a whopping $500 million printed papers.
ZIMBABWE, which is grappling with a severe shortage of foreign currency, will release an additional $300 million in bond notes under another liquidity support facility secured from a Cairo-headquartered lender, the African Export Import Bank (Afreximbank).
Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) governor, John Mangudya, disclosed this last week while presenting his mid-term Monetary Policy Statement.
The new facility will be in addition to the $200 million facility for bond notes secured from Afreximbank last year.
The first batch of $200 million has failed to quell the situation and a more than 100 % of US backed notes will be introduced.
Zimbabweans have continued to suffer long hours in queues to find cash for basic services since the bond notes introduction as the central bank tightly controlled the released amounts into fiscus, this to a larger extent, stabilizing value to the surrogate currency while skeptics insisted the value was artificial and stabilized by lack of liquidity, not value.
Now with a new lot of $300 million, Zimbabwe can only wait and see what happens to the economy after it registered less demands of cash due to alternative payment methods.
Traditionally, Zimbabwe had been a cash economy until the banknote shortages deepened in the first quarter of 2016, at least 70 percent of Zimbabwe’s transactions now go through electronic payment platforms.
Central bank figures show that values and volumes of electronic payments have gone up by 23 percent and 131 percent, respectively, between June 2016 and the end of the first half of 2017.
However the majority of these local transactions are not USD but local RTGS funds (source unknown) which can not be backed by actual Nostro USD , hence they are only good for the local market.
This could signal the return of a fully fledged local currency, as we are already locally transacting with figures which are not readily recognized beyond our borders.
THE Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) in 2014, issued US$300 million worth of Treasury Bills (TBs) to local banks to compensate companies whose foreign currency accounts it raided during the 2008 -9 hyperinflationary era.
More TBs have been issued since then against empty coffers, deepening the foreign currency crisis, forcing banks not to be able to issue enough foreign currency to its customers.
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