CBN Maintains Interest Rate At 27.5% Amid Economic Review

The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has decided to keep the country’s benchmark interest rate steady at 27.5%.

CBN Governor Olayemi Cardoso announced this on Thursday during a press briefing following the 299th MPC meeting in Abuja.

“The committee was unanimous in its decision to hold all parameters and thus decided as follows: retain the MPR at 27.50%, retain the asymmetric corridor around the MPR at plus 500 to minus 100 basis points. Retain the cash reserve ratio of deposit money banks at 50% and merchant banks at 16% and retain the liquidity ratio at 30%,” Cardoso stated.

This decision comes after a series of six consecutive rate hikes in 2024, signaling a cautious approach to monetary policy.

We’re Coming With New Inflation Rate, We’ve Not Said Prices Have Come Down – NBS Clarifies

The Statistician-General of the Federation, Adeyemi Adeniran, has advised Nigerians to disregard reports that inflation has come down.

Naija News reports that Adeniran explained that the report the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics (NBS) released was not the current inflation rate in the country.

In an interview with Arise News, on Tuesday night, he stated that NBS did not say prices of goods have come down in markets. He said what the report measured was how fast the price of goods is increasing in the country using the 2024 base.

He further explained that NBS decided to dump the 2009 base for the 2024 base to provide accurate data measuring the current inflationary pressures within the economy.

“The present government has been coming out with policies just to make things work better for the country. And there’s nothing wrong in that projection that government made. What we are doing as a responsible statistics office is to provide data, accurate data, that reflect present inflationary pressure within the economy. The government can now use to drive the objective of achieving that goal,” he said.