TICKET TO HIDE

The markets that Tidemarks follow are pretty erratic at present. Despite the strident claims that we are racing back to normality with every passing day, there is scant likelihood of any consistent corporate profitability emerging in the next year or so. Here on the southern tip we need also add in the chronic insolvency of the government. While political leaders everywhere insist that they will do all they can to protect the lives of their citizens from the virus, in truth they are also baffled by the statistics and advice proffered by just about everyone. Their sole tool is isolation and some regimes are back tracking into lockdowns again as they convince themselves of “second waves”. No end to the power of this pandemic to cause alarm and despondency is yet in sight.

Those of us who have the time and lack of self-respect to expose our intellect to the internet’s ceaseless flow of hysteria about every topic under the sun and more besides, quickly becomes junkies. The opiate of the moment is the imminent USA presidential election. Keyboards are afire with opinions on the utter mess over what we know as postal votes. Both sides are convinced the system is good/ bad for their candidate because of the well-known shortcomings of the system which allows for several points of manipulation. Envelopes have been opened prematurely, ballots have been found in a ditch and one bright spark wants to count them long after election day itself. Everyone accuses anyone of malfeasance and corruption and gross disrespect for democracy, electoral process, voters, and now, a recently deceased Supreme Court Judge. So excitable have the left-wing become, that luminaries on that side are publicly instructing their candidate (Joe Biden) never to concede defeat at any stage. That suggests that they are confident that they will unearth reasons after the election to reverse the outcome should it not suit their side.

It is easy when browsing these rants, to drift over to reading about the local scene without realising it. The South African versions are quite a bit more colourful though. Our Minster of Finance, charged with getting the nation out of the deepest debt hole in its history, prefers to post recipes on his pages. A Port Elizabeth city councillor is now in jail for smashing a full glass water jug on the head of an opposition member. And now in the time of the highest unemployment ever and an eviscerated economy, workers are being urged to strike for better working conditions and wages.

It’s not certain how SARS managed to leak a letter they recently wrote to a Gupta-controlled company named Linkway. The letter points out that the company has overlooked more than R100m in tax liabilities and asks if they would be so good as to pop round for a chat. Assuming there was anyone at the Gazelle Avenue address in Midrand to receive the letter, they must surely have swiftly forwarded it to Dubai  where the Gupta brothers must still be doubled up with laughter  and wiping tears of mirth from their eyes. Whatever happened to that extradition treaty between SA and the UAE? Is it still unsigned? Something to do with not having the correct colour of ink?

Professional rugby is going to resume in South Africa this weekend. We ought to be keen to see what remains of the squad that hoisted the World Cup last year, and the form of the economic refugees who have been in search of income in the northern hemisphere since then. For me, the great disappointment is the news that kick-off in this weekend’s games will be preceded by that dreadful virtue signalling charade of going down on one knee. This symbolic action was recently assumed as a totem by a rather nasty, extreme left wing near terrorist group in the USA to signify support for the allegedly persecuted black population of that country. Its transference to SA is breathtakingly inappropriate for a majority government and quite foolish for a country where barriers to sporting success are only talent and personal effort.  The captain of the Springbok rugby team that did the hoisting mentioned above is a black man. There is no higher sports appointment or honour in South Africa. This deserves a  #VoetsakFriday to all the sports officials who have clambered aboard the BLM train.

James Greener

Friday September 25^th, 2020

 

BRING THE CROWDS BACK PLEASE

The Reserve Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee this week took three days to decide to do nothing about the price of money and left the Repo rate unchanged at 3.5% pa. Thus, ending a steady bi-monthly sequence of rate cutting so far this year. What started as a knee jerk reaction to poor economic figures at the end of 2019 turned into a frantic attempt to demonstrate that the Bank was trying to help people cope with the lockdown. The Repo rate was at 6.5% at the start of this year so this has been a massive reduction which has resulted in some interest payments nearly halving.  Word is that at the next meeting in November, the Committee might even begin edging the rate upwards and the currency seemed to like that idea and strengthened a bit. Lenders are also pleased that their pitiful savings might generate a tiny bit more interest into next year.

We are still learning the extent of the dreadful impact caused by the various lockdown regimes which initially and plausibly were designed to minimise the number of folk who might be infected by a new and terrifyingly virulent virus. Fortunately the severity and rate of infection turned out to be substantially below the forecasts, but governments were delighted by how compliant scared people could be, and experimented to see how far they could go with travel restrictions, curfews, closure of beaches and libraries, bans on the sales of “sin products” and many other unwarranted infringements of civil liberties.

In contrast to the medical developments, which in this country at least, seems to have followed textbook curves of growth and decay, the social and economic outcomes of the government overreaction have been catastrophic. A fact which has largely eluded the politicians and bureaucrats who on full salary applied their minds to coming up with ever more lethal legislation. Astonishingly the new laws seem especially designed to tighten and deepen the state’s involvement in how to run a private enterprise – something that they are demonstrably awfully bad at doing!

Such as the Road Accident Fund – RAF to its clients -- which faces finding money to pay out unpaid claims approaching R17 billion. There is clearly a grievous mismatch between income and expenditure in this entity and closing the gap by increasing the  dedicated levy on fuel is obviously a bit tricky since everyone including staunch government supporters will have to stump up one way or another. Isn’t this mess a supposed slick modern replacement for the old Third Party Insurance that in the old days every vehicle owner had to purchase from a privately owned insurer? The Transport Minister’s current proposal is to borrow the R17bn. Not from me.

One amusing snippet to emerge from the new skills we have had to acquire during the lockdown is that demand for nose and face jobs is filling the waiting rooms of plastic surgeons. It seems that hours of face to face Zoom meetings have given people the opportunity to study themselves in close-up on the screen and plan improvements!

The days of everyone simultaneously tuning in to Springbok Radio at 5:45pm for “No Place to Hide” are long gone. As internet streaming of selected content direct to one’s portable device rapidly replaces broadcasting for delivering information and entertainment to individuals, the ability of politicians to target us with their views and opinions slips from their hands. It also  refreshes the issue of South Africa’s failure (politics trumped technology – it’s a long story)  to comply with the international agreement to migrate its old legacy analogue TV broadcast channels away from a prime piece of the electromagnetic spectrum. A segment that the mobile phone operators covet and need to meet the demand for services such as streaming.

The whole so-called social media phenomenon uses streaming to deliver inanities to the indignant. As the US election hullaballoo heats up, users are infuriated by demonstrable acts of censorship being carried out by the owners and operators of these “platforms”. They forget that in the days of “dead-tree media” letters to the editor were the equivalent to today’s Tweets, and were also subject to editorial blue pencils.

The novelty of having stadia without noisy fans has worn off. The mask confusion has become foolish and irritating. Please can we have our common sense back?

James Greener

Friday 18^th September 2020

 

BAD HAIR DAY

Tidemarks has a thesis that the absence of even the most basic skills in arithmetic, like counting and multiplication and division is increasingly responsible for the nation’s poor choices. Amongst the leaders and opinion-formers the concept of “per capita” is not widely grasped. For example, the popular political policy of confiscating the wealth of the presumed rich of this country and distributing it among the rest is all but pointless because the number of beneficiaries is so large. This simplest of sums is not meaningful for a dangerously large number of people.

This week, the worse than expected GDP figures for the second quarter of 2020 were published. The headline result was that our economy slumped at an annualised rate slightly worse than 50%pa. It is  not really much fun to dissect this horror limb by limb, as hopefully, this will never happen again in anyone’s lifetime. The sole thing that deserves to be emphasised, however, is that the government sector suffered not a scrap in this period and it was from this place of comfort that the politicians and bureaucrats told the rest of us how to survive. Also this week, the State of Disaster was renewed for another month. There is probably no supporting evidence for such a decision beyond NDZ’s explicitly expressed threat to find a reason to reimpose the bans on our pleasures. The interesting Covid research emerging these days are “sotto voce” admissions by the medics that perhaps their worst fears were a tad overly pessimistic and that their counting was a bit wrong. Once again if maths understanding were more widespread the nation should be able to enjoy a huge sense of relief and prepare to defenestrate those who think that hundred of thousands of arrests for breaching lockdown regulations is a satisfactory sign of great policing and wise infection control measures.

But the big news of the moment, which is impossible to explain to friends overseas, is that some of the biggest corporates on the block bought off a handful of mostly male, stupid and nasty troublemakers with a truckload of tampons. An advertisement commissioned by the Clicks pharmaceutical chain store for a hair shampoo targeted at young women was angrily identified by the EFF political party as racist. These incensed guardians of the country’s hair-care choices picketed, and, in some cases, trashed Clicks stores. The revelation that the advertising campaign was the work of a black executive team intent only on growing sales amused everyone, except for those who suffered from the violence. This included an elderly woman who on being manhandled produced a handgun from her bosom and was immediately hailed as a heroine. The donation of female hygiene items to disadvantaged communities was a very clever idea. Provided of course that the thugs don’t nick the shipments and try to sell therm.

My spirits sank when I read the news that Cricket South Africa has appointed someone to the post of “Acting Head of Pathways (Development)”. This is part of a press release about many other posts with fancy names and including something called a “high-performance team” who “will work with the Proteas men’s and women’s coaching staff in ensuring (that) a steady flow of talent reaches the national team(s) when needed”. A few of the names whose shiny suited bottoms will soon fill the plush chairs at the CSA offices, are surprisingly familiar, despite last week’s racist policy dictat. But just the idea that CSA employs someone to write that sort of guff, is depressing. The raw materials for selecting teams of any sport at any level is  a pool of gifted and self-motivated individual athletes who have been willing, and more importantly, able to train and practice for many long hours both alone and if they are lucky, under the guidance of an experienced and dedicated mentor. The nature of sport is that talented people appear without much warning or heed for needs that are neatly typed out on a meeting agenda. The very name “selector” reveals that filling a team sheet is more about who to leave out. Socialist theories about equal opportunity don’t win games.

James Greener

2020 anniversary of  9/11