Our Star of the Week is the Bank of Namibia whose Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) granted some marginal relief to local consumers when it announced the repo rate will remain unchanged at 6.50 percent. The repo rate is the rate at which commercial banks borrow money from the central bank and this, in turn, determines the interest rates consumers are charged at their commercial banks. BoN governor Iipumbu Shiimi said the MPC decided to continue supporting domestic economic activity and to maintain the one-to-one link between the Namibian Dollar and the South African Rand. “Global economic growth continued to slow during the third quarter of 2019 as observed in both the Advanced Economies (AEs) and Emerging Market and Developing Economies (EMDEs). Growth in the global economy is projected to slow to 3.0 percent in 2019, before recovering to 3.4 percent in 2020,” mentioned Shiimi. In its August 2019 MPC statement, Bank of Namibia recently announced the moderate easing of loan-to-value ratios applicable to non-primary property loans.