Philippa Larkin and Reuters
The rand on Tuesday lost steam again against a stronger dollar dragged lower on both local and international concerns.
Locally, President Cyril Ramaphosa said he was considering withdrawing from the International Criminal Court (ICC) and after data showed the country's composite leading business cycle indicator fell 0.7% month-on-month in February.
By 5pm was 25 cents lower against the dollar at R18.39 from the same time the previous day.
The ANC will aim to repeal the country's membership of the ICC, Ramaphosa said on Tuesday, the second time it has attempted to do so.
The party's decision at a weekend meeting of its national executive committee came after the ICC issued an arrest warrant on March 17 against Russian President Vladimir Putin, accusing him of the war crime of illegally deporting hundreds of children from Ukraine.
"The governing party, the African National Congress, has taken that decision that it is prudent that South Africa should pull out of the ICC, largely because of the manner in which the ICC has been seen to be dealing with (these) type of problems," Ramaphosa told reporters during a state visit by Finnish President Sauli Niinisto.
Only two days earlier, South Africa's Parliament announced that it would abandon a seven-year-long legislative process to pull South Africa out of the ICC's Rome Statute.
The international arrest warrant against Putin was issued after he had already received his invite from South Africa to the BRICS summit in August, and it would oblige South Africa to hand him over to the ICC in The Hague if he set foot in the country.
Meanwhile, the rand was also lower after the composite leading business cycle indicator, a measure of early signals of turning points in business cycles, fell by 0.7% month-on-month in February 2023, slipping further from an upwardly revised 0.2% fall in January.
The South African Reserve Bank (SARB) said this was the third consecutive month of decline as eight out of the 10 available component time series decreased.
This means that the leading indicator reading for the first two months of the first quarter of 2023 fell by 2.4% versus the first two months of the fourth quarter of 2022, indicating a further slowdown in the business cycle in the fourth quarter of 2023, given the six-month lag.
This after the rand weakened against the US dollar on Monday.
The dollar on Tuesday strengthened against a basket of world currencies.
Overall, the MSCI's index for emerging market currencies slipped 0.1%, as the dollar index inched higher after fresh bank jitters had traders expecting US interest rate cuts before long.
Bianca Botes, a director at Citadel Global, said in a market note this morning: “Markets continue to keep an eye on corporate results in the US.
“The rand gained some ground against the softer greenback, but remains rangebound. It is also facing pressure from a stronger euro and pound. The rand traded to an overnight high of R18.11/$. We start the day at R18.16/$, R20.07/€, R22.67/£ and R20.47/₣,” Botes said.
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