There Goes The Rand... Yet Again

There have been several local events that have played a role in the rand’s rollercoaster ride. However, they aren’t the main reasons for our local currency’s decline.

- Schalk Louw

As South Africans, we have this amazing ability to come up with catchy phrases for big events that take place in our country. But just as the US is running out of female names for hurricanes, it seems that we will also soon be running out of terms to label local catastrophic events, especially when we consider the magnitude and frequency of these types of events.

In the last four years alone, we had ‘Nenegate’ in December 2015, which saw the rand tumbling down to levels of around R16.75 to the dollar. Slowly things started to stabilise and improve until we saw the rand strengthening to around R12.75/$ after March 2017. Then, suddenly, we were faced with ‘Gordhangate’, which very quickly pushed the rand right back down to around R14.50/$. Then came one of my personal favourites, ‘Ramaphoria’, which took form at the end of 2017 and saw the rand strengthening to levels of around R11.50/$ in February 2018. In light of these events, our local stock market was unfortunately also adversely affected.