SA GOT WELL AND TRULY SCAMMED. (resent)

It’s quite cruel. The demographics and education systems of this nation are these days producing woefully underequipped politicians totally incapable of doing the maths required to understand the election calculus required when arranging political alliances. Recently we have been watching the creation of a number of single party winning outcomes. Like mayors and party leaders. It turns out these are very short-lived arrangements, allowing not even enough time for the current winner to get the Rolex around his wrist and the shisa nyama victory party  supplies delivered. Mind you, the sticky-fingered Jocks from the Scottish National Party are having tabulation trials too.

It’s very expensive and a huge waste of time and effort that nations seem incapable of organising an election where the winner is unequivocally acceptable to an effective majority. And one man one vote isn’t what it seems.

By their very nature, political alliances are bad ideas but of course in SA these shaky edifices are normally constructed with blue prints drawn in languages unfamiliar to the designers  and by people whose  mutual trust is seasoned with ancient tribal divisions. The  spineless current President Ramaphosa is an international type specimen  for an indecisive and hopelessly compromised political leader. Even the saintly Nelson Mandela spent a lot of time tip toeing through the tulips trying not to crush the blooms.

Over the Easter weekend the last secret part of the 21^st centuries great fraud was leaked and resulted in absolutely nothing happening.  Those members of the Gupta family who had so obviously brazenly stolen public and private money here in South African over the past decades  were granted amnesty and told by the UAE authorities that there were no charges against them. They now have passports issued by Vanuatu and can cease worrying about any legal proceedings originating in South Africa. “Have a nice day”  What? We were told endlessly that arrest and justice for these sleaze balls was guaranteed  and inevitable.  It looks as if we are not even going to have the pleasure of watching the complicit locals who helped to weave the tissue of lies, fall on their swords and it seems that all we are going to get from our leaders who sold us the lies is an assurance that they did what they could. Lies. Utter lies.

I wonder what the reaction of our justice teams was when it dawned on them that they had met their match in duplicitous underhand negotiation and promise making and breaking ? My own puzzle is what benefit there was for the Arabs to side with the Indians. It can’t have been money. Dubai has all they need of that stuff and some  of the Gupta loot might even still be in rands.

When the idea of BRICS was first flighted as an association of nations that had few things in common, most of us were deeply puzzled. Especially when it turned out that Jacob Zuma appeared to have invited himself aboard. All he seemed to be able to provide was a nice big solid capital letter S letter that sort of balanced the acronym. With the rand in poor shape even the fact that each of the member nations  used its own currency, seemed a poor basis for forming this particular liaison. Remember this was a time when our leader was running up against accusations of using public money to carryout improvements on his palace in Zululand. This was a charge he tried to divert attention from by demonstrating that the swimming pool was a reservoir for the vital thatch fire-control systems.

More recently our current president has continued the tradition of entertaining his fellow Brickettes by demonstrating the use of US dollar notes to keep the upholstery plump. But now suddenly we have our own special secret club with a lapel badge and special handshake. There is no denying that the BRICS have suddenly become sexy. But as we mentioned at the start, beware countries that have plans that require putting your own young people in uniforms.

James Greener.

Friday 14^th April 2023

SA GOT WELL AND TRULY SCAMMED.

 

It’s actually quite cruel. The demographics and education systems of this nation are these days producing woefully underequipped politicians totally incapable of doing the maths required to understand the election calculus required when arranging political alliances. Recently we have been watching the creation of a number of single party winning outcomes. Like mayors and party leaders. It turns out these are very short-lived arrangements, allowing not even enough time for the current winner to get the Rolex around his wrist and the shisa nyama victory party  supplies delivered. Mind you the sticky-fingered Jocks from the Scottish National Party are having tabulation trials too.

It’s very expensive and a huge waste of time and effort that nations seem incapable of organising an election where the winner the is unequivocal acceptable to an effective majority. And one man one vote isn’t what it seems.

By their very nature, political alliances are bad ideas but of course in SA these shaky edifices are normally constructed with blue prints drawn in languages unfamiliar to the designers  and by people whose  mutual trust is seasoned with ancient tribal divisions . The  spineless current President Ramaphosa is international the type specimen  for an indecisive and hopelessly compromised political leader. Even the saintly Nelson Mandela spent a lot of time tip toeing through the tulips trying not to crush the blooms.

Over the Easter weekend the last secret part of the 21^st centuries great fraud was leaked and resulted in absolutely nothing happening.  Those members of the Gupta family who had so obviously brazenly stolen public and private money here in South African over the past decades  were granted amnesty and told by the UAE authorities that there were no charges against them. They now have passports issued by Vanuatu and can cease worrying about any legal proceedings originating in South Africa. “Have a nice day”  What? We have been told endlessly that arrest and justice for these sleazeoids was guaranteed  and inevitable.  It looks as if we are not even going to have the pleasure of watching the complicit locals who helped to weave the tissue of lies, fall on their swords and it seems that all we are going to get from our leaders who sold us the lies is an assurance that they did what they could. Lies. Utter lies.

I wonder what the reaction of our justice teams was when it dawned on them that they had met their match in duplicitous underhand negotiation and promise making and breaking ? My own puzzle is what benefit there was for the Arabs to side with the Indians. It cant have been money. Dubai has all they need of that stuff and some  of the Gupta loot might even still be in rands.

When the idea of BRICS was first flighted as an association of nations that had a few things in common , most of us were deeply puzzled . Especially when it turned out that Jacob Zuma appeared to have invited himself aboard mainly on the strength of having a big letter S to sort of balance and complete the acronym. With the rand in poor shape even the fact that each of the member nations  used its own currency, seemed a poor basis for forming this particular liaison. Remember this was a time when our leader was running up against accusations of using public money to carryout improvements on his palace in Zululand. This was a charge he diverted by demonstrating that the swimming pool was actually a reservoir for the vital thatch fire-control systems.

More recently our current president has continued the tradition of entertaining his fellow Brickettes by demonstrating the use of US dollar notes to keep the upholstery plump. But now suddenly we have our own special secret club with a lapel badge and special handshake.. There is no denying that the BRICS have suddenly become sexy. But as we mentioned at the start, beware countries that have plans that require putting your own young people in uniforms.

James Greener.

Friday 14^th April 2023

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