Fundi Tshazibana: Central banking, fast and slow

Address by Ms Fundi Tshazibana, Deputy Governor of the South African Reserve Bank, at the Nelson Mandela Bay 2021 Leadership Summit, 28 July 2021.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

Good afternoon and thank you for the invitation to speak at your Leadership Summit.

As a relatively new central banker, I have been fascinated by how central banks function – the magnitude of the decisions they make and the most important elements of their work often go unnoticed by many of us, because these things are simply what ought to be. We don't think when we go to the ATM to draw cash − the banknotes are there. When we take out our cards to make payments and when we make EFT payments, we don't stop to think about the payments process, unless of course, there are system glitches. We don't think about how government is able to borrow money in financial markets every week – it just does. In the middle of various economic crises, we haven't lost sleep over many of these things that seem to just happen.