It has all gone ominously quiet – except here on the southern tip
where the All Share marches on and upwards. Investors obviously can see no
reason why earnings should not keep improving and anyway cash these days is
definitely not king but pauper! Already
the bold are sniffing out recovery situations among the miners where the high
wage settlements are starting to be followed by the inevitable and tragic
retrenchments. The platinum sector gained over 6% in October. Banks, on the
other hand, were eschewed.
One cause of the reigning peace was of course the closure of markets
and near closure of everything else on the eastern seaboard of the US where cyclone Sandy demonstrated that not even presidential
candidates have as much power as nature. In Europe
the squabbling about who should pay for whom to do what has subsided for the
moment as well. But not for long I suspect. There are some deep and heart-felt
bitterness’s dying for an airing.
Overseas players have slowed their rush for the exits. The rand has
settled down, although at weaker levels. Most people are getting resigned to
the near inevitability of having Jacob Zuma staying on as president. There
really doesn’t seem to be a candidate brave enough to mount a challenge. And anyone
slightly competent chooses to feed at the trough from outside the sty.
The Statistician-General – in reality a just a mid ranking government
employee with a preposterously grand title – but much respected for being one of the few in government who is
able to do sums, got to wear his dubious yellow suit again and handed over a
lavish tome of Census results to anyone within reach. As well as generating the
usual froth of disbelief and criticism it seemed to tell us nothing that hadn’t
already been guessed. Within a day, however, the pres. started to fret about
accusations that his government had failed to reduce wealth disparity but
seemed unable to find any numbers in the great work to contradict the charges.
Odd that.
The government is now
spending at an average rate of more than R2.5bn a day – including weekends.
That’s a great deal of money and furthermore is R400 million a day more than
the taxes it collects. Now I know that the borrowing requirement is OK and the
deficit is within manageable proportions but it is still worrying to this old
bear to think that every morning the nation wakes to find its debt has
increased by nearly half a billion compared to yesterday. Some talking head in
government has suggested that bankers need to take sociology courses. He believes
that this will make them realise the callousness and dangers of lending money
to poor people. The bankers should agree but only if he first attends courses
on economics and finance so that he can realise the callousness and dangers of
talking nonsense.
That bankers are indeed heartless fiends was demonstrated vividly by
the way that one outfit in the City simply deactivated the key cards of a
number of employees overnight so that they first discovered that they were
unemployed only when they were unable to get in the front door of their offices
the following day. Can you just imagine arriving at work to see your colleagues
milling about outside and having to try your own key in the slot? They were not
even afforded the opportunity to fetch the photo of the kids from their desk,
sneak a copy of the client phone list or leave rude messages on the internal
email system. Bang. Thanks for coming. Have a nice day.
I am delighted that Sebastian Vettel is looking set to retain his
world championship in Formula 1. It provides a sporting topic which is not
rugby. You won’t believe how many Province supporters have appeared from the
readership of this column to jeer at my trashed claim about the deserved new
home for the Currie Cup.
James Greener
2nd November 2012
