The role of the regulator is to serve the public interest of the economy by maintaining financial and price stability. One of the tool for achieving this objective require that the central bank or the regulator sets policies that control the transmission mechanism of short-term interest rate, particularly monetary policy channels of short-term interest rates. The financial sector in Ghana has undergone many reforms in the past few years. One of the outcomes of this is that banks are given the freedom to determine interest rates on their own as long as they follow the central banks guidelines. In doing so, the central bank charges commercial banks, a base rate/bank rate for borrowing from the central bank. The commercial banks also shift the total risk to borrowers (e.g., businesses, SMEs, corporations, entrepreneurs and individuals) by adding a risk premium to the bank rate. Therefore, the base rate is the minimum interest rate set by the central bank below which banks are not permitted to lend to their customers. Unless there is a government mandate, the central bank rule specifies that no bank may offer loans at an interest rate lower than the base rate. This implies that borrowers would be charged a particular rate of interest above the base rate for borrowing from any commercial bank. Financial Reporting and Money Market You are the financial analyst of your company. Your company wants to acquire a property to expand its operations. Assume, you advise your company to borrow from any financial institution (particularly, a bank) to be able to acquire the property. What will be the average borrowing rate the bank will charge your company for borrowing from them? Required: Given the scenario above, download/obtain a recent financial statement (within the past 5 years) of any bank (in Ghana) of your choice. With your knowledge in strategic finance issues and the principle of financial statement analysis, provide a brief (general) report on the financial statement and use the information from the financial statement to estimate the base rate. Additional Information Suppose that the bank receives a required rate of return of 18% and the beta in the market is 0.75. Use the 2021 (3rd Quarter) values for all macro-level indicators needed to compute the base rate. Using the past year and the current year in your computation is an added advantage.