The Central Bank of Egypt (Photo: Al-Ahram)
The measure was a stipulation of law no.194 for 2020, which governs the CBE and activity within the banking sector.
According to the resolution, the council will be chaired by the Prime Minister and will include the CBE’s governor and sub governor, the ministers of planning and finance, as well as the finance minister’s deputy for financial policies.
It will also comprise a number of experts, including former planning minister Ashraf El-Arabi, Head of the Federation of Egyptian Banks Mohamed El-Etreby, and the economic expert and former PM Hossam Eissa.
The CBE’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) is anticipated to review the key interest rates on Thursday for the eighth and last time in 2021 amid expectations that the committee will keep the current rates unchanged.
Over the past seven meetings, the MPC maintained the CBE’s overnight deposit rate, overnight lending rate, and main operations rate at 8.25 percent, 9.25 percent, and 8.75 percent, respectively. The discount rate was also kept unchanged at 8.75 percent.
The rates have remained unchanged since December 2020’s meeting when the CBE cut interest rates by 0.5 percent (50 bps).
On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve maintained the US interest rates in its final meeting in 2021, leaving the federal funds rate at a range of 0 to 0.25 percent. This follows the Fed’s decision to hold rates near zero until the economy has fully recovered from the effects of the pandemic.
The Federal Reserve said on Wednesday it would end its pandemic-era bond purchases in March and pave the way for three quarter-percentage-point interest rate hikes by the end of 2022 as the economy nears full employment and the US central bank deals with a surge in inflation.
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