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 9th 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 24th March 2023.
