The First Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ghana, Dr Maxwell Opoku-Afari, has advised Journalists to accurately report news on finance and the economy.

He said this will calm financial market participants and prevent disorderly reactions during these periods of heightened uncertainty.

The ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict has triggered a downgrade of global growth forecasts by the International Monetary Fund while the crisis has also heightened inflationary pressures due to rising food and energy prices. This has necessitated the rollback of COVID-19 era policies and monetary policy tightening across various countries.

Opening a workshop for Journalists for Business Advocacy (JBA), Dr Opoku-Afari said there is a need for accurate reportage on these developments to rebuild confidence in the economy.

“Efforts at boosting confidence will have to come from all facets of economic life. The institutions must play their role, private agents must take advantage of conditions around them, government must play its role in delivering growth in a stable economic environment and the Central Bank will have to guarantee low and stable inflation using the tools available at their disposal. The press must leverage all to influence the direction of economic thinking and to influence society.”

“Let us remember the IPI cardinal principle of journalism. The press must inform, persuade and influence society. In so doing, the press will have to use all available data at their disposal, to drive analytical discourse and imbibe confidence. Journalists must go beyond the data provided to them and do more interrogation of the data to understand better, the data generating facts. All these work in concert to engender economic confidence and this is where we ought to be moving towards”, he stressed.

He explained that developments in the global economy including the Russia-Ukraine war prompted strong and coordinated monetary and fiscal policy measures, including a hike in the policy rate by 250 basis points to 17.5%, the reversal of the Covid-19 related macroprudential regulatory relief measures, and the government’s 20% cut in expenditures as well as an additional 10% cut in discretionary spending to support the fiscal consolidation process.

“The government further announced a syndicated arrangement of $2.0 billion in line with approved external financing for 2022 and for liability management. These measures are expected to help regain macroeconomic stability and boost investor confidence in the domestic economy,” he added.

Furthermore, the First Deputy Governor said “the Bank of Ghana extended the forex forward auctions to include the Bulk Oil Distributing Companies (BDCs) to ease off increased volatility in the foreign exchange (FX) market, and in the maiden auction on 30th March 2022, the Central Bank sold about $104.86 million above the auction target of $100 million to the BDCs.

The FX forward auctions, he said, were part of the measures taken by the bank to address the FX liquidity within the local petroleum sector, minimise the uncertainty of future FX availability and aid price discovery, especially for the general pricing window within the downstream sector, adding “this strategy has contributed to the relative stability observed on the forex market and, with some normalization underway, the trend is expected to continue until the local currency returns to its fundamental equilibrium level.”

He mentioned the economy has rebounded strongly from the pandemic (COVID-19), as evidenced by the national accounts data recently released by the Ghana Statistical Service.

He also pointed out that the remarkable resilience exhibited by the banking sector over the two-year period could be attributed to the comprehensive financial sector reforms that took place before the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, adding, the sector continues to remain liquid, profitable, and well-capitalised as the industry’s measure of solvency, the Capital Adequacy Ratio has remained, well above the revised regulatory 13% prudential limit.