Bank Al-Maghrib re-released its first quarterly board statement on Tuesday, which was withdrawn hours after it was released yesterday, Tuesday, without any explanation.
It is interesting to note that the statement of the Bank’s Board was withdrawn from the Central Bank’s website in three versions, Arabic, French and English, shortly after publication, and it did not appear on the bank’s social media accounts.
The governor of Bank Al-Maghrib canceled his first press conference in 2023, which was scheduled for yesterday after the first quarterly meeting of the Central Bank this year. After waiting at the bank’s headquarters for about 50 minutes for the start date of the press conference, journalists were suddenly informed of a delay “due to personal circumstances related to the manager of the Al-Maghrib Bank.”
The Board of Al-Maghrib Bank made decisions at its meeting yesterday morning and discussed part of the decisions of the Akhnuch government, including raising the main interest rate to 3 percent, and announced that it became aware of the government’s willingness to increase subsidizing food prices, included in the settlement fund, “considering that this will allow” to keep headline inflation at a high level.
Returning to the statement of the bank’s board, it becomes clear that it has made decisions, first of all, to raise the main interest rate for the third time in 6 months, in order to set it at 3 percent yesterday, after it was at 2.5 percent in December 2022. and before that it was at the level of 1.5 percent in June 2022.
The bank’s board justified its decision by striving to “avoid the emergence of autonomous inflationary cycles and strengthen the stabilization of inflationary expectations in order to facilitate their return to levels consistent with the goal of price stability.”
The bank’s board also discussed issues related to inflation, prices and the clearing fund, and stated that “programmatic initiation of an increase in price subsidies for products included in the clearing fund will help keep inflation at a high level of 3.9 percent overall.”
