I have had lots of fun catching up with all the market activity that took place while I was away. Prices have been all over the place haven’t they? As expected, the stories from the US of A tell of rapidly growing piles of rotting investments although amazingly, so far, not too much has been unearthed in their equities markets. I am, certain, however, that the soft and nasty stuff is there and will stink all the worse for being left so long in the dark. Nothing especially bad in any market here in SA has yet been reported and hopefully we are in better shape. I do, however, think that we are being rather naïve about our currency.
For several reasons, most of us focus on how many rands we need to buy a US dollar and it has been around the level of just over 7 for so long now that it sort of feels “right”. Against other currencies, however, there is no cause for such misplaced and benign complacency. The rand is a runt.
Although ridiculed by more sophisticated analysts than I, the behaviour of the price of a well-known metal called gold provides an interesting and frightening measure of what has happened to our money. These days you need more rands than ever before to buy yourself some of this gold. In fact something like R153 000 per kg (and you thought biltong was expensive!) Smart folk will ask why you would want to and my simple reply is that 18 months ago, a kilo of gold cost just R100 000, and it was half that price when we were welcoming the new millennium. Now before you race out and fill your boots with the metal, I should point out that the stock market has performed even better than that in this time. That of course is the same as saying that the JSE has provided a positive return after inflation. This note is just an illustration of the falling worth of our currency.
Talking of stuff that has gone down the drain, what are we to make of the Gauteng Government’s call for tenders to provide a Status Quo Analysis of the Municipal Sewerage Treatment Plants (sic) Capacity? Don’t we have anyone working for those municipalities who can do that as part of their job anyway? Can’t they be trusted to tell us the depth of ordure we are in?
One of the cell phone network operators reported this week and the fact that they have 13.5m subscribers in SA alone is not entirely good news. You may have noticed that the bureaucrats got their way and phone FICA is upon us. In what we are assured is a move to bust crime, every cell phone owner will have to provide the usual nonsense of certified copies of ID, address (so the crooks will know where to go to get which model phone) and doubtless other guff. Chalk up a plus for photocopier and paper and storage suppliers, but a huge minus for the time and cost of this stupidity. Can’t you just see the mess when you take your papers to one shop only to be warned months later by some call centre in India that they have been lost and your phone will be blocked! Who believes this will have any effect on decreasing crime? Not me. In fact I predict an increase in the assault of cell phone shop staff.
Also in need of some firm clips around the ear are the buffoons who scheduled the Twenty-20 Cricket World Cup at the same time as the Rugby event. Circus Cricket hadn’t even been invented four years ago so could it have been all that hard to have glanced at a calendar and picked something different from 2007?
The trip to see the Namaqua flowers was a great success although it was a bit alarming to look around at one fellow tourists and realise that this trip is a sort of rite of passage for greying empty-nesters!
James Greener
31st August 2007
