Any lingering hopes that South Africa might escape relatively unscathed from the global economic storms were dashed on February 5th when Tito Mbo-weni, governor of the central bank, predicted that Africa's biggest economy would go through "a rough patch for the next three to four years". Any politician who did not pass on that message to voters was "living in cloud-cuckoo-land".rnThe same day, in an attempt to stimulate the economy and mitigate the effects of a recession, the bank chopped interest rates by a full percentage point to 10.5%, the biggest single reduction since 2003. As Mr Mboweni confessed at the time, he personally would have preferred a two-point cut. This week he signalled that if growth figures for the last quarter of 2008, due out on February 24th, were worse than expected, there could be a further cut in rates ahead of the monetary-policy committee's next scheduled meeting in April.rnLike the rest of Africa, South Africa had until recently been doing relatively well.
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