Krugerrands
are back trading at over R20 000 a coin. This happened last in 2016 and is
the combined result of a soggy rand and a perkier dollar gold price. The fascination
with this investment device is its utter invisibility to the tax authorities –
even when they are not on strike – and the role its price pays as an indicator
of perceptions about South Africa. Not a lot is the current indication.
Once again
the great and good in the business of setting the price of money itself, met in
Pretoria this week and made no change to the repo (repurchase) interest rate When not coping with President Cyril’s rapid mind
changes about whether or not to nationalise the Reserve Bank, the staff there
must surely notice that whatever they have done (mostly nothing) in the last
few years with the one really big lever at their disposal, our economy is still
in a deep hole. Isn’t it time to do something different? The most radical move would
be to step away from control by committee and let the markets compete for the short-term
funding provided by the central bank. When this was last tried 20 years ago,
collusion between the borrowers brought the experiment to a halt. Maybe the staff
could do some thinking about how to curb that practice instead of just waiting
for the next meeting in 2 months. If the repo rate is a critical barrier to
getting the country back to productive work, assuredly the market will diagnose
that and correct it. Instead we all are obliged to spend way too much time and
energy filling in forms for government officials to lose. The global evidence
is that the real barrier to actual economic freedom and growth is the number of
those unproductive government officials who on May 8th will
undoubtedly vote to keep their jobs which seems to consist mostly of stopping
the private sector from doing theirs.
Like the
famous tale about the bank robber who explained to the judge that he robbed
banks because that’s where the money was, the story here involves the Public
Investment Commissioner. It is the custodian of the single biggest stash of other
people’s wealth in the country and guess what? A never-ending stream of people
line up at his door with a story about what riches they could create if they
were granted just a tiny bit of this pot to invest. What the split is between
scams and actual success is not easy to say, as it is the blow-outs that (eventually)
get the publicity. What’s very worrying is how many of the scams have an inside
job component. And very senior too. This week the acting CEO was suspended.
A perfect example
of the fallacy that human rights exist was provided in South Africa this week
by a government body called the Human Rights Commission. This completely racist
organisation, totally in thrall to the anti-white factions in this country, explained
to the world that the meaning of the words “human” and “hate” can be determined
only after the history and circumstances of the aggressor and victim are
considered. They claimed that in judging whether an incident was a hate crime deserving
censure and punishment or just a minor offensive moment easily excused, depended
on who said or did what to whom. Malema’s calls for genocide (but not right
now) was apparently in the latter category. Outrageous.
What might jokingly
be called the main stream media (MSM) here in SA probably consists of the state
broadcaster and two newspaper groups, both in remarkably poor financial health.
The latter two devote way too much space pointing out each other’s shortcomings
but I suppose that’s cheap and easier to do than despatching reporters. But
what these guys have done is to make the white male all but disappear from South
Africa. In just a few years the MSM have found a South Africa where people like
me have no role to play except of course for paying tax and operating rescue
services -- which includes keeping politicians and their kin out of jail. It’s
a remarkable feat, made a little easier perhaps by the departure of many of these
people from their homeland.
The
Duckworth-Lewis formula used to decide the outcome of a shortened limited overs
cricket match has been around a long time and there must be stats to test if it
favours the side batting first. Old D & L have certainly handed the Sri
Lankans some tough decisions recently.
James Greener
Friday 29th March 2019
