Economist · AI engineer · Pretoria, South Africa
I teach machines to read the economy.
I'm a PhD economist building AI systems for central banking — finetuning LLMs to read economic sentiment, training computer vision models, engineering agentic workflows, and standing up research data infrastructure at the South African Reserve Bank. Research Fellow at UP Macrolab.
now 7.00%
view the data (69 observations)
| effective date | rate |
|---|---|
| 2000-01-01 | 12.00% |
| 2000-01-14 | 11.75% |
| 2000-10-17 | 12.00% |
| 2001-06-15 | 11.00% |
| 2001-09-05 | 10.00% |
| 2001-09-21 | 9.50% |
| 2002-01-16 | 10.50% |
| 2002-03-15 | 11.50% |
| 2002-06-14 | 12.50% |
| 2002-09-13 | 13.50% |
| 2003-06-13 | 12.00% |
| 2003-08-15 | 11.00% |
| 2003-09-11 | 10.00% |
| 2003-10-17 | 8.50% |
| 2003-12-12 | 8.00% |
| 2004-08-13 | 7.50% |
| 2005-04-14 | 7.00% |
| 2006-06-08 | 7.50% |
| 2006-08-03 | 8.00% |
| 2006-10-13 | 8.50% |
| 2006-12-08 | 9.00% |
| 2007-06-08 | 9.50% |
| 2007-08-17 | 10.00% |
| 2007-10-12 | 10.50% |
| 2007-12-07 | 11.00% |
| 2008-04-11 | 11.50% |
| 2008-06-13 | 12.00% |
| 2008-12-12 | 11.50% |
| 2009-02-06 | 10.50% |
| 2009-03-25 | 9.50% |
| 2009-05-04 | 8.50% |
| 2009-05-29 | 7.50% |
| 2009-08-14 | 7.00% |
| 2010-03-26 | 6.50% |
| 2010-09-10 | 6.00% |
| 2010-11-19 | 5.50% |
| 2012-07-20 | 5.00% |
| 2014-01-30 | 5.50% |
| 2014-07-18 | 5.75% |
| 2015-07-24 | 6.00% |
| 2015-11-20 | 6.25% |
| 2016-01-29 | 6.75% |
| 2016-03-18 | 7.00% |
| 2017-07-21 | 6.75% |
| 2018-03-29 | 6.50% |
| 2018-11-23 | 6.75% |
| 2019-07-19 | 6.50% |
| 2020-01-17 | 6.25% |
| 2020-03-20 | 5.25% |
| 2020-04-15 | 4.25% |
| 2020-05-22 | 3.75% |
| 2020-07-24 | 3.50% |
| 2021-11-19 | 3.75% |
| 2022-01-28 | 4.00% |
| 2022-03-25 | 4.25% |
| 2022-05-20 | 4.75% |
| 2022-07-22 | 5.50% |
| 2022-09-23 | 6.25% |
| 2022-11-25 | 7.00% |
| 2023-01-27 | 7.25% |
| 2023-03-31 | 7.75% |
| 2023-05-26 | 8.25% |
| 2024-09-20 | 8.00% |
| 2024-11-22 | 7.75% |
| 2025-01-31 | 7.50% |
| 2025-05-30 | 7.25% |
| 2025-08-01 | 7.00% |
| 2025-11-21 | 6.75% |
| 2026-05-29 | 7.00% |
Selected work
NLP · LLMs
Finetuning LLMs for economic sentiment
Domain-adapting large language models to read tone in economic and
financial text — the same problem my PhD attacked with transformers,
now at production scale.
"the MPC decided to increase the
repurchase rate by 50 basis points"
SARB MPC statement · May 2022
Big data · Infrastructure
SARB Research Data Centre
Building the South African Reserve Bank's secure environment for
research on confidential microdata.
tax · survey · text · image
[ secure enclave ] research
[ secure enclave ] research
AI engineering
Agentic workflows
LLM agents that do real research-engineering work — pipelines, not
demos.
Vision models
Computer vision, finetuned
Adapting vision models to extract economic signal from images and
documents.
PhD research
Reading central banks
Sentiment, topics and consistency in SARB policy statements — NLP on
two decades of MPC communication.
4 papers · simtran architecture
Get in touch
Collaboration, data problems, or anything at the intersection of AI and economics.
charlvanschoor1@gmail.com