A brief gust of woe and dismay blew
through the JSE when instead of surging to and through 52 000 the All Share
backed off and actually fell for a few consecutive days. The panic however has
melted and confidence in the certainty that share prices must rise eternally
was restored. In the currency market, however, sellers of the rand continue to
dominate. Both wise and dumb money is leaving.
The worlds of finance and investing are infested
with jargon and structures designed to intimidate and belittle outsiders. A
classic example appeared this week with the news that the state is considering
how best to “recapitalise” Eskom. The monopoly power utility wishes “to be
reimbursed for operational losses resulting from the difference between what it
was allowed to charge for electricity and what it spent on producing the power”. Translated. this means: “We are so bad at
running this business that we spent way more money than we earned and now we
need some more. Please make the customary large transfer of tax payer’s money and
fax us the proof of payment immediately”.
Meanwhile, in Australia, the dismal truth about
the alleged skill of actuaries and fund managers has been uncovered. This is
that most of us need to keep on working and saving for our retirement for far
longer that the sunny assumptions of the experts have been suggesting. We are
living longer and getting a far poorer return on our savings than either of
those professionals predicted. The sole remedy (aside from getting our offspring
and their friends to support us) is to work for longer, and retirement age in
Aussie is being moved out to 70! Now
this really is an inconvenient truth which is certainly not yet accepted in Europe for example.
The government ramped up its level of
disdain and contempt of the citizens of the nation several notches this week.
Amongst its most spell-binding acts of crass stupidity was the election of
Julius Malema to membership of the Judicial Services Commission – the body
whose function is to select fit and proper persons for appointment as judges. Not
only is this a huge and distressing message for the legal profession and their
tradition of learning and deliberation but it will also satisfactorily irritate
the several other opposition MP candidates suited for such a post. It might
even distract Malema for a while.
Noticing that the SABC boss man was surfing
the “Brides from Venda”
pages on the internet and pretty much distracted, the government slipped
through another one of its ideological targets and announced that it will be
culling considerable swathes of Afrikaans language content from the airwaves.
This act deserves a serious response from advertisers as well as viewers
especially in the light of the Corporation’s own admission that the programs
are popular. In the meantime Miss Lynne Brown our new Public Enterprises Minister
(who naturally has scant enterprise experience) is facing calls from SAA for
recapitalisation. What else? Instead of simply flogging off the whole sorry
mess she has been waffling on about “business-models” and the like. Just
killing off all the free flights on SAA for the chosen ones would save plenty
of cash.
The general impression is that the
government’s policy of agricultural land transfer has been a calamity. But
perhaps this impression is simply a result of biased and hostile reporting and
indeed the nation’s newest farmers really are working just as hard and
productively as their predecessors. However, the fact that the country is now a
net food importer is far more significant than Rural Development Minister
Gugile Nkwinti’s exciting news that three of the new boys are now millionaires
and so are doing really well.
Soccer must be one of the few sports in which
32 reasonably well-matched national sides can be assembled for a tournament. It’s
obvious that Bafana would have been way out of their depth in Brazil. And if
the state persists in its meddling, pretty soon the ‘bokke and the Proteas will
slip from the international rankings too.
James Greener
27th June 2014
