Raising interest rates was “absolutely the right decision, and it was long overdue,” Patrick Werr writes in The National. He says inflation before the price shock that followed the EGP flotation was already high, placing the blame on the “rapid expansion of the money supply over the past few years.” He says governments, since 2011, relied, in effect, on printing money to finance deficits. Werr adds that concerns about the access to credit following the rate hike are not entirely valid as “the sad truth is that Egyptian banks haven’t been lending all that much to private businesses.”

Tags: