BoG replies Bawumia

The Central Bank has revealed that its interbank figures are drawn from the international news agency Reuters.

This comes a few weeks after a Former Deputy Governor of the Bank, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, subjected the Bank - together with the Statistical Service - to criticism over conflicting interbank figures it puts out to Ghanaians.

“The statistics on exchange rates from the Bank of Ghana and inflation from the GSS are in my humble opinion, not credible,” Dr Bawumia, who is now a member of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), stated last month.

But announcing a new policy rate after the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting on Wednesday, Governor of the Bank of Ghana Dr Henry Kofi Wampah mentioned that trading has been dormant in the past two months as a result of lack of liquidity; hence, it has not had any figures to work with.

“Reuters gives us the interbank rate which we report but because of lack of liquidity in the system, for about two months until recently there had been no trade at all on the interbank market,” he said.

“As liquidity returns to the market as we have seen in the past few weeks, the rates will converge,” he indicated.

He added that rates have started declining.

“We have seen interbank going up a little because the trading is returning to the market while because of liquidity we have seen the rates the banks trade with their customers also declining.”

Therefore, there was no change in the 19 per cent policy rate.