Dinner for One Please James

 

There is a great deal of excitement about the latest  generation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) computer programs and how clever and useful they are `especially for everyday tasks for just the average Joe.  This morning before I was properly awake and was looking for smart  things to say about yesterday’s interest rate hike, my laptop was offering me a dinner party recipe for  6 vegetarians  and a chocolate desert. Well,  this smarty pants computer has not learned anything about me in the last 10 years. What I really wanted to know and share with readers, was why we were hit with a double jump in the price of money  (repo rate increased from 7.25%  to 7.75%) yesterday) when it is obvious that just about everyone, who if not on the ANC “favoured cadre” list”, is struggling to pay the bills. One offered reason (and a gloriously asinine one) is that the Monetary Policy Committee members  had been applying their minds to this thorny question since the previous meeting 2 months ago and it would seem indecisive if they resorted to a knee -jerk reaction because “The  Fed” (the USA equivalent of the SARB) was battling its own demons, rescuing atrociously run banks.

But to return to mankind’s latest toy – artificial intelligence, a fierce test of its useful ness will be when someone asks what the gold price will be on Monday, whether Bitcoin has any real intrinsic value and whether long-dated US bonds are a buy. These tests can be run for any date , over any period with the provision that unlike political contests, aka elections, cheating is forbidden. The weather would also be an excellent test of forecasting . It has long intrigued me that no one seems to think it interesting to publish on Wednesday, Monday’s forecast for Tuesday alongside Tuesdays’ actual weather. One could give a score for accuracy. Note that we are as a civilisation we are confidently designing a whole new economy based on how hot we think it will be next year!

For a modest fee one may download various versions of these super smart search engines and I was about to do so when the headline popped up that GDP growth was tanking and that this  was ascribed to the regular and lengthy morale-sapping power cuts. This is more than enough artificial cleverness for one man and a 10 year-old laptop, so I withheld my credit card and went searching for the rugby scores instead.

COSATU – the trade union movement --  thinks it would be  a good idea to scrap the Ministerial Handbook. What a splendid idea, The Book is no more than a  pre-approved expenditure list for qualifying politicians and bureaucrats who have convinced each other that their salaries are insufficient for supporting the life style to which they are entitled. Tax payers play no part in setting this list except for picking up the tab. The beneficiaries’ penchant for multiple wives, sleek cars, tasteless houses and complicated watches knows no  bounds, so setting the list to zero seems smart for a nation a bit short of cash.  After all, if the ministers feel hard done by, they can always go and join the line of state grantees, which this year set another record of recipients and occasioned another one of those weird ANC victory celebrations when what was needed was a lament.

Tidemarks must apologise for failing to spot that the Boat  Race was won by Cambridge last weekend. Also dragging on is the really foolish idea of using SA taxpayers money to bribe the richest  sportsmen in the universe to promote SA as a tourist destination. This smells like someone trying to fulfill a promise to get a football-mad grandson a season ticket to White Hart Lane.

James Greener

Friday 31^st March 2023.

IS BIG BROTHER GETTING MORE INQUISITIVE?

 PRASA is the wholly state-owned outfit that is supposed to devote its time to running the passenger trains that in theory criss cross this sunny land. Apparently they don’t own the lines on which these trains run, so when, as is so often the case, the bad guys have got there first and stolen  the lines (note to overseas readers  -- yes this is a real thing. No I don’t know how they do that)– PRASSA  don’t have much to do. But what they do have is a firm intention to protect it. The news that they had gone out to tender to procure a lot of ammo caught everyone’s attention and then triggered memories of the  good old days when there  was an outfit called The Railway Police. Who and where are those guys these days? They would have a firm view about crooks stealing the steel.

One of the simplest economic statistics published almost every day is a number called Notes and Coins in circulation. The SA Reserve Bank is the curator of this parameter and broadly speaking it never stops going up. Every month there is a local peak as cash salaries are paid to workers who like the feel of folding money in their pocket. And at festive seasons, people seem to like to have cash in their pocket and there is an annual high. Obviously the Covid debacle disturbed this pattern, but this past Christmas for the first time ever, there was less cash in circulation than the year before. What’s happening? Undoubtedly a significant social behaviour shift is taking place. On the face of it the banking system has engineered a huge consumer migration from cash and the antipathy towards having ones wealth recorded as entries in a computer has evaporated. Something like R20bn in folding money has been returned into the Reserve Bank vaults in the last six months. To what extent this is a result of the massive, alleged money laundering activity that allegedly took place in connection with the looting of the VRS bank or the R1bn a month simple larceny at Eskom as reported by recently departed Eskom CEO is unknown. This scribe’s education in the fine detail of these mega frauds is very lacking. Suffice to appreciate that in general, large sums of money are usually observed moving in “unusual directions.”

It is astonishing how quickly very respected names in the banking industry can be trashed. One minute spoken of in hushed tones with a genuflection towards the Queen’s picture (Barings Bank in 1995) The next the shuffle in prison garb and utterly meaningless platitudes and falsehoods about the safety of the institution and integrity of the staff and how the remedy and repairs in progress will ensure it will never happen again. However, about every half dozen years it does happen again. The first of the two derailments that have happened so far this year, involved ultra “woke” Californians whose niche banks by sheer luck found themselves as the serendipitous beneficiary of what everyone else experienced as the Covid Calamity. Their banks filled with unexpected cash flows. But they had scant idea what to do next. Mostly they burned it in foolish schemes. Next in the frame was Credit  Suisse   a 137 year old nearly royal Swiss bank, recently deemed “too big to fail” who needed tens of billion dollars of central bank money to keep the wheels on!(aka failing!) Students of the unusual cash flow direction topic will find the quantum of the fee requested to organise this rescue quite amazing.

Here is a lovely story, all pink soft and gentle but armed with a deadly warhead that effortlessly destroys the man-made global warming narrative. It is the simplest sort of data, being the earliest date each year that the cherry blossom in Washington DC has been recorded. Current global warming theory predicts that 2023 should be among the earliest ever, but this is not the case. This year the date ties with those observed in 1946 and 1976 as only the 9^th earliest on record. Incidentally the concentration of  manmade CO2 on those occasions was well below 80%. Some of us with a background in scientific research will recognise thesis-destroying data moments such as these which caused us to consider a career in poodle grooming.

James Greener

Friday 24^th March 2023.

COVID RESPONSIBLE FOR THE BANKS GOING BANG!

 

The egregiously misnamed Economic Freedom Party (a relatively minor force but with a terrifying history of fomenting considerable violence and criminality in short order.) is planning to arrange a nationwide “protest” about the lack of planning and action of the African National Congress in their task of running the country. Absent the simmering threats of violence, looting and lawlessness, the rest of the country is broadly in agreement with the EFF that the ANC is utterly useless and that a “protest” is long overdue. The nation is however anxiously waiting to see if it does take the form of a quiet walk in the park outlined for us by their erratic racist Commander in Chief (sic) These events usually end as a serious looting sprees from which the security forces are seen to flee. Usually after first levering the loot into official vehicles. Double-speak becomes the real official language of the nation.

Many years ago, when Tidemarks was an innocent wide-eyed liberal undergraduate with long hair and long-suffering suffering parents, I was made aware of the concept of reparations. The theory was simple. Descendants of (mostly white-skinned) families in the USA who must all have benefitted enormously from slave ownership, would be required to recompense survivors of those black-skinned families who had suffered from being slaves. So naïve was I then, that I was unsure about who it was that was expected to pay whom. It appeared to me that every slave descendant now living in the relative affluence of the US in the 1960s where there was jazz, Disneyland, ice cream, comics and cars with huge fins and even some measure of political freedom, were the lucky ones. It was they who should be visiting the steaming filthy villages in Africa with bundles of dollar notes. These and other questions and hideous misconceptions were painstakingly answered and corrected for me over the next three decades, culminating perhaps in a meeting held in San Francisco this week where the recommended reparation payment was confidently set at $5m per living American descendant.  This is not as helpful as it will need to be, not least in the matter of where these funds would come from. And so, I suppose another generation of hopeful mendicants will be disappointed. But at least I personally can never again have doubts about social engineering cash flow statements.

            A very significant financial event, missed by pretty much everyone, was triggered by the lockdown debacle that accompanied the official reaction to the respiratory infection, first noted in late 2019. Many people were told that they could no longer work in their employer’s office. This created a huge demand for home computers and then an associated surge in the number and size of banks that financed these purchases. These institutions grew at an unprecedented rate, and it wasn’t long before they were boasting about spending money on pronoun courses and other the “woke” guff to amuse their huge numbers of clueless and inexperienced staff.  The ultimate danger signal flashed a few weeks ago but still few spotted it. The CEO of the Silicon Valley Bank –leader of the pack of banks now racing to the bottom – sold a large chunk of his own stock. Without exception every regulator seems to have been asleep at the wheel and now the usual “It was not me; I was not there.” stories are fighting for attention. The patently untrue claim that no one will lose money has been dusted off and another generation are learning that “Too big to fail!” is a lie. Shame.

One feature of professional sport that helps to keep the politicians from interfering too much (with of course the exception of good old South Africa) is the dispassionate speed with which the salaried staff are fired. The Supersport App has a “News”  section which this weeks culling of soccer players and coaches has turned into a bloodbath. Merciless. No civil servant or ministerial lacky wants to stray too close to these shareholders and owners (think voters) when they are apportioning blame for poor performance.     

Now at last here is a good news story. “One of the founders of Queen has been knighted by the King.”

James Greener

St Paddy’s Day 2023

AND AFTER THE WOOD RUNS OUT?

Financial markets have a remarkable attitude towards calendars. They largely ignore any dates which are marked  up as significant. In places like the US where listed companies are required to report quarterly (here we tend to think a semi annual contribution to the fiction shelves of the library should be sufficient.)  it’s a godsend for the talking heads who need to fill reports and studios with hot words. So just to add my observation tuppence worth – the rand is at a 1 year low versus most major currencies.

Tidemarks’ has always had a deep dislike for and distrust of bureaucracy. Supporters of Brexit have never managed to convince me that having more layers of lawyers drawing income from the public purse was a good thing for anyone other than the paper shufflers who see incomplete forms as an offence. A classic example appeared this week when the European Union told Elon Musk that his recently purchased computer program named  Twitter, must employ more staff to keep an eye on what its customers write about. Apparently the EU has enacted legislation with the totally misleading title of “ Digital Services Act” (basically a censorship scheme ) and they think Elon is incapable of complying with this attack on freedom of speech unless he employs more busybodies with blue pencils. That’s just way too many interfering activities right there. Long term, history tends to favour the freedom seekers, so the wise money should be on the boytjie from Pretoria in this squabble.

It was entirely characteristic of President Frogboiler that he should take so long to announce the outcome of his long-awaited cabinet re-shuffle. Even the TV broadcast on the night was delayed by several hours, but in the end, we learned that Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa would be the nation’s first Minister of Electricity. Later on ,however, Dr Kgosientsho explained   that his job description was silent on loadshedding. This was a bit of a surprise to most of his audience.  In fact, he went on to explain that he had been appointed to ensure delivery of the government’s energy plan. This is a document, already announced by President Ramaphosa but clearly not yet implemented! Puzzling.

Students of this genre of government-speak are pretty sure the country has been down this path many times before. The new minister is indeed a very smart guy and the list of his academic achievements include a BSc in Civil Engineering , two Masters degrees (one in Business Leadership & one in Public Administration)  and  a PhD in Public Affairs. Notably however, his CV opens with the declaration that he is an African National Congress (ANC) politician; a status confirmed by the multimillion rand wristwatch on his arm.   Now President Cyril has a well-known preference for party unity and loyalty above all else. And some of us are now starting to worry that Kgosientsho’s selection process might have bowled Cyril around his legs.

It’s certainly not funny for those people living through this ultra cold spell currently disrupting the Northern Hemisphere but the complaints appearing in the social media are amusing. Apparently it’s not as windy as it usually is at this time of year and that’s giving the renewable wind energy fans a hiding. The sun’s gone AWOL too, and many energy utilities are being forced to fire up the coal-stoked boilers and send a letter of apology to the Doom Pixie, Greta Thunberg.  Amazingly the data indicate that some places are using an energy source called “American firewood” or is that a joke? Hopefully what is really happening is that more and more sensible people with real responsibilities (i.e. not politicians) are realising that planning and managing the electricity supply systems for real live economies doing important stuff like manufacturing,  health, education and production are  ideally lifetime career choice for adults.  There are few alternatives for supplying the amount and reliability of power that the population of this planet requires .None of the so called “renewables” have delivered anything more than irrelevant entertainments for people who can’t do the physics and chemistry. The time for pretending that intellectual dilettantes are doing anything but massive harm is over. “Net Zero” is a total scam.

James Greener

Friday 10^th March 2023