It has been a special week for those whom we have entrusted with the running of the nation. They have not shirked from their duty to tell us how it is. At a stroke, those citizens who choose price before provenance when purchasing clothes were branded as traitors. Painful punishment was promised for anyone stocking and selling too many t-shirts turned out by the Asian Tigers. There was the clock-watching magistrate who released all the baddies that she had not had time to see. In similar petulant mood the Department of Labour published a list of all those companies which it claimed hadn’t properly or timeously filled in the forms that detail the racial mix of their staff. Sadly, no one responded that in the last dozen years they had lost their old South African talent for seeing this difference.
The good news came in the form of an undertaking from the fellows cutting down the trees that are growing too close to intended route of Gautrain. (I thought it was an underground train?) They promise to plant three young trees for every one chopped down. However, why many of the saplings will be located miles away from the newly ravaged suburbs was not explained. The head honcho of the body tasked with overseeing the woefully inadequate supply of bandwidth in the country returned to work after a 10-month suspension. The industry has developed at a fair clip while she was away tending her roses; I trust she gets herself and her staff up to speed quickly. We can afford no further delays in joining the wired world. And then there’s this rather strange concept of “number portability”. I thought that was exactly what a cell phone provided.
The Governor repaid the folk who bought him breakfast on Thursday by warning them that they were buying too many cars and DVDs. This is his way of telling them that they can expect a hefty interest rate rise quite soon. He also felt that the rand might be a little “out of balance”. Before the coffee in front of his audience got cold, the bond market swooned and the currency plunged. I hope it wasn’t that he got a bad egg.
While normally this would have been good news for the commodity stocks, the dollar prices of many of the commodities themselves are also falling fast. The market’s weaker moments this week have therefore tended to have the mining shares leading at the front. It also did not help that some analysts managed to scratch through Sasol’s results, which were published during the week, and find things to fret over. However, the end of the world is not yet clearly visible and the all-share index seemed reluctant to remain below 21 000 for very long. Next week we experience the quarterly futures closeout event. Sometimes nothing much more than eye-wateringly large volumes go through the market on these occasions, although there is always the potential for fireworks in the prices as well. The market does have a sort of “lull before the storm” feel to it.
Of course, the week was also filled with the inevitable news of squabbles, stupidity and stubbornness on the part of the administrators of the sports we all care so much about. What a dreadful mess. I doubt that the forthcoming trip to Germany by Premier Shilowa and his retinue with the purpose of learning how to run a World Cup will result in anything more than fond memories of beer and wurst.
James Greener
15th September 2006
