Who would have thought that we could go that low? I am talking about our currency of course. This week, the rand improved to less than 7 per US dollar. Not all of this strength is attributable to demand for our “big five”; the greenback itself is getting a mauling as there seems to be a growing global distaste for and distrust of things American. Statesiders themselves, however, have neither noticed nor cared that everyone else thinks they are sliding into an economic morass. They are surging into Wall Street buying anything that is available, so that the Dow popped over 13 000 on Wednesday. This enthusiasm is catching – somewhat giving the lie to the earlier assertion that we don’t care what happens in the US – and index record highs are being recorded all over the place. Our own record high happened on Tuesday (again), but that too may be surpassed today, if the current mood holds.
Today is the last trading day of the “JSE month”. And it is the start of an especially long weekend for most folk. Tomorrow we celebrate our ability to hold elections. The excitement this creates will probably last through until Monday when most of us will decide not to go to work but to use the day to prepare for not working on Tuesday, which is Workers Day. In other words, it will be a long time before markets here in SA will get an opportunity to catch up with and react to whatever happens in the rest of the world.
Did you know that today is IP Day? (No, not Inept Proteas but Intellectual Property!) Biz Day has devoted two pages, apparently sponsored by Microsoft, to alerting us to the terrifying fact that people don’t pay for things that they can get for free. It is ironic that the sponsor’s own software products have been a significant resource for people wishing to create and capture their ideas and achievements in digital form. But then it became cheap and easy to copy and communicate that material and this means that the creator and (oh horror) the taxman fail to reap any benefits! In particular, the entertainment industry, who have until recently been able to control the distribution of their products, are howling loudly and calling in the cops. Using policemen to confiscate fake DVD’s from street vendors for later resale at the backdoor of the police station is a poor use of our resources. Audiences would not buy poor quality “pirated” copies if the originals were priced correctly; which rather suggests that the so-called celebrity entertainers and their entourages have for a century or so been paying themselves much more than their offerings are worth.
Now, I have been a “content provider” (albeit a trivial one) in the investment industry for about 20 years, offering opinions, views and information. Broker’s publications never carry a price tag, in the hope that readers will pay what they think the stuff is worth. It is a salutary lesson to discover what that is. Certainly, the arrival of the internet has probably meant that one’s work swiftly reaches a much wider audience than your own mailing list, so that probably is not a bad thing. It also reaches competitors, and this causes both worry and delight depending on your point of view. This electronic digital world is taking some getting used to, especially for those who want to keep secrets. Isn’t the market place wonderful?
This leads one to the question of what the Proteas now think they are worth.
James Greener
26th April 2007
