HC Securities and Investment forecasts that the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) would keep interest rates unchanged at its 2023’s first monetary policy committee (MPC) meeting scheduled for Thursday, February 2nd, according to an emailed research note.

HC said that putting interest rates on hold would "allow the market to absorb the interest rate hike by 300 basis points hike of the December 22nd, 2022 meeting."

"We expect the headline urban inflation to accelerate and reach 23.5% in July 2023 before it retreats to 18.2% in December 2023, averaging 21.5% throughout 2023," Heba Monir, financial analyst and economist at HC, said.

"We expect the EGP 1-year T-bills to average around 20.6% in 2023 (accounting for a 15% tax rate for US and European investors), taking into the calculation a 200 bps rise in the corridor that we expect to materialize over the rest of the year," she added.

Egypt’s annual headline inflation rate increased to 21.9% in December 2022, compared to a record of 6.5% in December 2021, the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) announced in a press release on January 10th.

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