The SARB’s Financial Stability Committee has been set up to protect and enhance financial stability. It is tasked with considering qualitative assessments of the conjunctural assessments of risks to, and imbalances in, the broad financial system and formulating policy action to mitigate identified threats, as well as considering the appropriateness and adequacy of resolution policies and measures for crisis management.
The SARB’s toolkit is continually being refined and includes the ability to deploy a countercyclical capital buffer for banks. This provides the SARB with the means to raise aggregate bank capital buffers during upswings in the financial cycle, and allows for the release of these buffers during downswings. Currently, given the modest level of credit growth, the countercyclical capital buffer is set at zero.