The pandemic has changed many aspects of our life in 2020, and interest rate setting is one of them. The rate decisions taken by both the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) and its global counterparts in the past nine months are set in broad macroeconomic trends that have been in place for years, and which have made this speedy and sizable reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic possible. Now, will these trends remain in place in the coming years? Will the pandemic exacerbate them or, on the contrary, will it usher in structural changes that call for a different calibration of monetary policy in the future? ​