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The South African Reserve Bank has left the repo rate unchanged at 5.5%, governor Gill Marcus said on Thursday.

The prime rate would stay at 9%.

This was in line with market expectations with all 24 economists surveyed by Bloomberg agreeing the rate would be held steady.

It was the fourth consecutive meeting where it remained unchanged, after it was reduced by 650 basis points between mid-2008 and December 2010. The decision keeps the rate at its lowest level in over 30 years.

The target inflation range is between 3% and 6%. Read more…

Negotiations on a sweeping deficit-reduction deal collapsed in acrimony on Friday as US House Speaker John Boehner pulled out of talks with President Barack Obama, dealing a blow to efforts to avert a looming debt default.

With the deadline just 11 days away for raising the federal government’s borrowing limit, a stern-faced Obama expressed deep frustration with Boehner for walking away and demanded that he and other congressional leaders meet him at the White House on Saturday.

Boehner said he could not overcome disputes with Obama over taxes and entitlement spending and said he would now try to hammer out a deal with the Democratic-controlled Senate to increase the country’s $14.3-trillion debt limit by August 2.

“We have run out of time,” Obama said at a hastily called news conference, saying it was “hard to understand why Speaker Boehner would walk away from this kind of deal”.

A deep divide over tax revenue derailed the latest negotiations, ending an ambitious bid to craft a $3-trillion deficit-cutting plan that now seems beyond reach.

The world’s biggest economy will run out of money to pay its bills without a deal by the August deadline. Read more…

AP Photo Medco’s automated pharmacy is shown in Willingboro, N.J. Express Scripts Inc. and Medco Health Solutions Inc., plan to combine in a $29.1 billion deal

The top two U.S. companies managing prescription drug benefits are uniting in a $29.1 billion deal they say will help achieve key goals of the health care overhaul: reining in costs and improving patients’ health.

Express Scripts Inc. announced an agreement Thursday to buy larger rival Medco Health Solutions Inc. Together, they would handle the prescriptions of about 135 million people, more than one in three Americans.

That will give them even more clout in demanding discounts from drugmakers, who are dealing with falling or stagnant revenue as an unprecedented number of blockbuster drugs taken daily by millions is getting cheaper generic competition.

Pharmacy benefit managers process mail-order prescriptions and handle bills for prescriptions filled at retail pharmacies, acting as middlemen between employers offering prescription drug benefits and drugmakers.

They also hold down costs by extracting discounts and rebates from drugmakers, using tiered copayments that nudge patients to buy generics or the lowest-cost brand names, and reminding patients to take medicines as scheduled to

limit costly complications.

Together, Express Scripts and Medco handled more than 1.7 billion prescriptions in 2010 and reported almost $110 billion in revenue, although Medco recently lost several contracts covering millions of people.

Read more…

France will not need to introduce austerity measures in response to increased debt exposure from the euro zone’s new rescue plan for Greece, its finance minister said on Saturday.

Francois Baroin said in an interview with French daily Le Monde that the government would be able to maintain its deficit reduction targets and would not be “impoverished” as a result of the bailout.

Prime Minister Francois Fillon said on Friday that the package for Athens agreed by euro zone leaders late on Thursday would increase France’s debt by some 15 billion euros by 2014, though it would not otherwise directly impact its public finances.

Baroin, who recently succeeded IMF-bound Christine Lagarde, told the newspaper: “France is participating in the form of a guarantee.

“…Since last year, European statisticians have told us that the debt of the European Financial Stability Facility (bailout fund) should be linked to each country according to what it guaranteed.

“Beyond that accounting impact, France doesn’t need to borrow more and our deficit isn’t impacted. Read more…

Motivational speakers and self-improvement books pitching the message that success will come easily to you if only you believe it will, could just as well be selling snake-oil, says Harvard Business Review.

The Management Tip of the Day offers quick, practical management tips and ideas from Harvard Business Review and HBR Any opinions expressed are not endorsed by Reuters.

“If you believe you will succeed, you will. Right? Not quite. Research has shown that optimism and the confidence it brings will help you reach your goals, but there is no guarantee.

In fact, if you believe that success will come easily to you, you are more likely to disappoint. This is because you’ll fail to put in the necessary work.

You need to think positively but also be realistic about what achievement entails. Knowing that success is hard won forces you to put in the necessary effort. Don’t spend too much time visualizing the end result. Read more…

We like to think of summer as a time of rest and relaxation but for many small business owners, nothing could be further from the truth. Rather than lounging on lawn chairs, we’re on the phone, online, on the move as changed schedules and vacations make it even tougher than usual to juggle business, family and play.

If ‘busy’ and ‘stressed’ describe you, knock some of the stress out of summer with my 11 Time Management Tips.

These other time management resources of mine will also help make it easier to balance your work and life while still accomplishing what you need to do: