Politicians in the US have reportedly come up with a raft of new rules and regulations for their banks. These will ensure that there will never again be any crisis or credit crunch. Isn’t that comforting? I wonder if the new rules include any which forbid banks to lend money to people who are unwilling or unable to repay it. That seemed to be a source of much of the trouble last time. Hopefully the fellows who run banks had long ago spotted this and made a note that it was a poor business model.
Governments are usually not well placed to offer advice on how to run things. Here on the southern tip, the state owned and run organisations are hardly in great shape. So bad are they that at least two different teams have been assigned to go and find out what’s wrong with them. Worryingly, the so-called independent team appears itself mostly to be independent of the experience and knowledge to run any successful business while the ministerial team is the one which to date has been in charge of the ailing enterprises. No clear winner there.
After tonight the soccer stadiums in Nelspruit and Polokwane will no longer be required by FIFA and the folk there must be wondering what they should now do with them. Identical problems will soon occur elsewhere. By tonight half of the teams who arrived for the competition will have made use of the international departures hall. However, President Zuma assured an audience this week that there are plans to fill the seats in these arenas with paying spectators in the years ahead, but forgot to mention what they might be watching. Here in Durban, rather excitable voices have been shouting about how magnificent it would be to host the Olympic Games on the shores of the Indian Ocean. Now it would be nice to harness the vibe and the energy that the world cup has generated and flog off the millions of unsold flags (the Bafana t-shirts have passed their sell-by date) but should we not do the sums first please.
News that the Chinese currency would in future become more flexible was accompanied by film clips showing clerks feeding wads of notes through counting machines. While this demonstrated that without doubt the yuan (or is it he renminbi?) note itself is already quire flexible, the markets dithered about whether this was good or bad news for the prices of anything. Similarly Britain’s emergency budget allowed for the word austerity to be given a good outing and markets bounced around. The sorely needed deficit reduction appears as usual to rely more on raising income than cutting expenditure. No one has the courage to tell voters the truth that amounts paid and promised to state employees, pensioners, welfare recipients and other vote buying entitlements over the last few decades were way too generous and will probably be unsustainable in the new world order.
Nevertheless, the great and good of the G-20 nations have ensured that there are sufficient funds to jet them off to Toronto this weekend. Here, after pretending to be surprised by the presence of the baying protestors – who have also travelled to Canada for the occasion – the delegates will meet behind closed doors to compose grave yet optimistic statements before seeking out lunch. Wisely the new Aussie prime minister feels she has more pressing tasks at home. She is so right.
Provided they have not gone home in sympathy with their soccer colleagues, Italy will meet the ‘bokke in East London tomorrow for what we all hope will be a better game. At least it won’t last 11 hours like that tennis match or 90 minutes without a score like some other game I could mention.
James Greener
25th June 2010.
