AI-generated image of the signal you override
My father pulled me aside once and said something I have never forgotten.
“You and I have the same problem. We trust too easily. And bad people will always take advantage of that.”
He was calm when he said it. He was naming something he recognised in himself and saw forming in me. A wiring. The instinct to extend trust before it has been earned, to assume shared ethics in a room where the other person is operating on a different ledger entirely.
I carried that observation for years without fully understanding it. I thought awareness was enough. I thought knowing about the wiring would protect me from it.
It did not.
Last year, someone I trusted took my work and presented it as theirs. A person I had helped, whose published work carried structural contributions I had made. For years, people around me had warned me. More than one. They said be careful. They said the dynamic was not what I thought it was. I dismissed every warning because the friendship felt more real than the pattern forming underneath it.
The deepest recognition was not the plagiarism. It was that my father had already given me the diagnosis, and I still overrode the signal. I edited my own reading of the situation to protect a conclusion I preferred. That the relationship was mutual, that the investment was shared, that the ethic was the same.
It was not.
And then came the second override. People around me said take the high road. Let it go. Be the bigger person. So I stayed silent longer than I should have. But accountability does not dissolve because you choose quiet. It defers. And deferred accountability does not surface as measured correction. It erupts, volcanic and disproportionate, harder to govern than it would have been if you had simply acted when the signal first demanded it. The high road, taken repeatedly out of avoidance rather than genuine grace, is just another override. A different signal ignored. A different cost deferred.
That failure has sat with me all week. Because midweek, I watched an institution do the same thing in public.
The Bank of Zambia cut the monetary policy rate by seventy-five basis points.
I had taken the week off. Fatigue demanded honesty, and I needed space to think about Canary Compass and what structural changes it requires. The plan was stillness. Then the decision landed.
The data did not support the magnitude. Inflation has reached single digits, and people are celebrating as though the cost of living has healed. It has not. Prices are rising more slowly. That is not the same as prices coming down. It does not undo what households absorbed over years of erosion. And the people who absorb most directly, the economically disenfranchised, who represent the majority of the population, do not hedge, do not shift portfolios, do not refinance. They carry the full weight.
The architecture does not support the transmission. This is an economy where four in five workers operate in the informal sector with no access to bank credit at any price, and the credit that exists within the formal system is concentrated. Government securities absorb a large share of bank assets and set a floor under lending rates that the policy rate alone cannot move. A lower policy rate in that structure does not function as broad-based stimulus. It delivers selective benefit to the narrow band of borrowers who already have access.
We already have evidence for this. When the Bank cut by twenty-five basis points in November, short-end Treasury bill rates rose, the first post-cut auction was undersubscribed, and the two-year yield moved in the opposite direction. The transmission architecture did not carry even a modest signal to the broader economy. This cut is three times that size, and the structure has not changed. For the narrow band of formal borrowers who already have access, some easing will register. But that selective activity generates demand that tempers the very disinflation the majority is being asked to celebrate, and the cost of that slower disinflation falls entirely on the households who never saw the benefit of the cut. The policy serves a fraction and invoices the rest.
Twenty-five basis points would have achieved the headline. The median forecast in a Reuters poll of economists was precisely that, a twenty-five basis point cut. The Bank of Zambia delivered three times the consensus estimate. This was not a marginal difference in reading the same data. The magnitude itself was the outlier. Seventy-five reads as a signal aimed at political comfort rather than economic discipline. To their credit, the statutory reserve requirement was left unchanged, which suggests awareness of the more dominant inflationary channel. But that single anchor does not resolve the central question: what is the purpose of an aggressive cut in a monetary system that cannot carry it broadly?
There is a counter-argument, and it deserves honest engagement. My own published work identifies the fiscal channel, not the interest rate channel, as the stronger inflation driver. If the Bank of Zambia protected the stronger lever and moved the weaker one, the case could be made that the cut does minimal damage while delivering a political headline. On pure mechanics, that logic holds. The question is not whether the cut causes immediate damage through a weak channel. The question is what the magnitude reveals about how the institution makes decisions. But credibility is not built on mechanics alone. It is built on signal.
Twenty-five basis points would have carried the same tactical logic at a magnitude that signals caution. Seventy-five signals that the political room was louder than the data warranted. The real danger is precedent. Favourable conditions make aggressive moves feel safe. The kwacha is stronger. Inflation is in single digits. Foreign investors are buying bonds. Each of those facts is real. Each is also being read as permission rather than tested as structure. Single-digit inflation still sits above the target band where it has been since April 2019. One strong auction does not resolve a refinancing challenge that runs the full year. Conditions that feel supportive can be fragile, incomplete, or narrow, and an institution that moves further than the architecture warrants because the surface feels calm will find the pattern difficult to reverse when conditions shift. Each decision looks defensible in isolation. The accumulated pattern tells a different story.
I watched the 2020 to 2021 period closely. I watched institutions that should have served as checks drift into short-term alignment. The cost of those decisions did not arrive immediately. The bill was patient. It always is.
Sometimes it is fine to be the only voice in the room saying the uncomfortable thing. If you are right, and you know you are right because you have tested your thinking critically, reality will eventually back you. Slowly and without courtesy, but eventually.
This is a lonely position to hold, especially in environments where people position themselves for appointments rather than speak plainly.
On the Canary Compass channel, I said the central bank has lost credibility. That is a harsh verdict. Let me state it with the precision the claim demands. This decision damages credibility because it breaks proportion between data and action. When decisions appear shaped by the political room rather than the economic structure, credibility does not collapse in a single moment. It erodes in the quiet revision of what the institution was willing to see. And when that erosion reaches a threshold, the cost lands where it always lands. On the currency, on risk premia, on the households least equipped to absorb another shock.
Next week, I will publish the full analytical case. The transmission arithmetic, the distributional reality of who this cut actually reaches, the inflation trajectory, and the historical parallels. The data will settle it. This week, the reflection is enough.
My father’s observation was not about one friendship. It was about wiring.
Some people are built to override the signal. The relationship in the room feels more credible than the pattern underneath it. The political alignment feels more real than the transmission arithmetic. The friendship feels more durable than the warnings accumulating around it. This is a specific kind of loyalty. Loyalty to the conclusion you prefer over the signal you have already received.
Institutions carry the same wiring. Central banks are not staffed by fools. They are staffed by professionals who operate inside rooms where political proximity feels weightier than structural constraint. The override is not a single lapse. It is a culture. A repeated willingness to edit interpretation in favour of comfort. And the cost compounds quietly until the gap between what the institution says and what the structure reveals becomes the thing everyone sees.
That is how credibility dies. In people and in institutions. Through the accumulated habit of choosing comfort over clarity.
My father was right. I do trust too easily. That will not change. What can change is the structure around the wiring. The analytical architecture, the publication record, the independence that turns a harsh verdict into a testable claim rather than an opinion. That is what I am building.
The signal is there. The question is whether you act on what you already see, or whether loyalty to comfort invoices you later.