While most of us have been fretting about strong rands, quantitative easing and other diversionary events, the bull has supplied the All Share index with a very impressive 20% boost since Spring Day. It has been the resurgent resources which have contributed most of the oomph. Financials as a sector are battling, and in my view will probably continue to do so until demand for their product – money – picks up. Even in rand terms the rise in the international commodity price indices has been very useful and one wonders what would happen if the currency one day did do a swallow dive and bolster local earnings even further.
Most of the great and not so good talking heads are gathered in South Korea for a knees-up where currency strength is definitely a huge agenda item coming closely below the lunch menu and the pecking order for the group photo. The delegates and their prejudices, policies and proposals are generally unchanged and indistinguishable from those present at every previous meeting. If they really do have an influence on the way things work then the current mess is therefore their fault and there is really no sense in letting them try to fix it again. More probably the economic situation is and always will be the result of about 6 billion people looking out for number one. The best thing the heads can do is go home, slash government spending and interference, which distorts the proper allocation of resources, and then retire to write their memoirs about how they for once did something really useful for the planet.
Government was warned that their RICA policy of getting every cell phone owner to register would be tricky. And so of course it has been. The mania for governments to compile databases of its citizens has reached a particularly high pitch here in SA. “Combating Crime” is almost always the offered reason for the exercise and sadly that is definitely not working. In fact most of us suspect that criminals themselves have easy access to these schedules of who owns what and where they live, thus providing not only targets but identities to be purloined for their own fraudulent registrations.
The state itself seems uncertain about the value and whereabouts of what it owns. Within minutes of promising to sell R20bn of its assets in order to lend the cash to Eskom, it announced that it wouldn’t be doing that anymore. The reason for this about turn has not been revealed but my guess is that the asset register was a disappointment.
Our new minister of sport says that he is worried that boxing appears to be run out of a car boot and that other sports are in similar administrative disarray. Without exploring how any minister can even identify poor administration, politicians ought not to be involved in what we boys and girls do for recreation, fun and exercise. Unless we are really lucky or talented, the costs are usually borne from our own pockets and so a car boot is undoubtedly cheap office space. Some sports, however, are so popular that commercial sponsors, eager to be associated with potential winners and to get the attention of their fans and spectators have found it beneficial to wave their chequebooks. But Minister Mbalula is now determined to use taxpayers money to “ruffle a lot of feathers” This is not a minority sport involving birds. It is a program that will demonstrate that when policy replaces talent, skill and effort the outcome is anger, disappointment and disillusion for just about everyone in the nation who yearns to wave the flag and celebrate a victory.
The ‘bokke substitution policy in action in Ireland last week looked suspiciously like an early case of feather ruffling. It must be very unsettling for the captain to see valuable and on-form players whisked off the field for no better apparent reason that there is someone on the bench who deserves a cap. Wales is going to be a very tough one. Go ‘bokke. And go Alonso.
James Greener
12th November 2010
