How dare the
World Bank accuse SA of a lack of innovation. Just for a start our minibus
drivers can turn any piece of unused veld into a highway. And there is nothing
that can’t be bought from a vendor at a traffic light. Fanta is the magic remedy
for making insistent officials vanish and semi-automatic weapons can reportedly
be hired by the hour. We have a Police Intelligence Unit and this week the
National Treasury convinced foreigners to lend us USD 1.5bn for 30 years at a
rate of just 5.65%. When you see what happened in the past 30 years here on the
southern tip, these must be mighty brave lenders. We have a government policy
that transfers wealth from people who earned it to a handful of well-connected
cadres and our military airports can be used for private weddings. Not
innovative? Bah.
This week, Sasol’s
Inzalo scheme which required stock brokers to classify their clients by race
became submerged in a veritable flock of roosting chickens. Other shareholders
got badly burned. And anyone who positioned themselves to profit from a cut in
the repo rate was surprised when the Reserve Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee decided
that the price of the nation’s money needed no adjustment.
At about the same time, Federal Reserve
Governor Janet Yellen, a kindly-looking granny figure, similarly surprised the
self-appointed experts in these things. She suggested that it might be time to
sell off some of the trillions of dollars’ worth of assets acquired by the US Central
Bank when they were easing things in a quantitative manner. Numerous and large
fortunes were made from this program and the prospect of it unwinding has set
off alarm bells.
All of these
events are examples of intervention by officialdom who believe that they have
the skill and duty to price risk correctly. Invariably they cannot and so in
the transactions that follow there is always a winner and a loser whose
benefits and losses are underwritten by public money. This means that there are
fewer resources to cope with real unforeseen natural disasters like earthquakes
and hurricanes. Bailing people out of trouble caused by nature is a legitimate
and welcome use of public funds. Bailing them out of trouble caused by their
own cupidity, gullibility and foolishness is not.
And now it
turns out that even the bean counters have a different result depending on who
is paying for their services. This may not be a new development but finding out
about it so soon after the event is, and it is yet another outcome of the
internet. The instant and ubiquitous
dissemination of information both real and fake is causing us all to
recalibrate how we live our lives. Obviously, we all need to tighten up our
filters and raise our levels of scepticism and disbelief. Thereafter we need to
appreciate just what the stuff that is probably real is teaching us. Which is that
even in the hitherto mostly sacrosanct halls of professionals, academia and
public office, affairs are far more rotten, suspect and corrupt than we ever
imagined. However, the internet has torn down the curtains of respect and reverence
for authority and revealed that self-interest is virtually the sole driver of
most human behaviour. Sad but somewhat liberating knowledge.
While we have
amazing freedom to criticise and castigate our risibly poor and dangerous
political leaders in their running of the country we have to depend on the All
Blacks to point out what’s wrong with SA rugby. Which is that the 15 best young
rugby players eligible to pull on a Springbok jersey may not and cannot be
selected because, like the economy, the nation’s leaders don’t believe in free
markets even for the voluntary enterprise of playing a sport to earn a living.
James Greener
Friday 22nd September 2017. Vernal Equinox (S hemisphere)
