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 18th September 2020
