FIRE IN THE HOLE

The price of money in the form of 10-year borrowings by the US government has doubled in the past 6 months. For a country with so much debt that ought to be a seriously worrying statistic. The actual numbers are small (1.16%pa now versus 0.54%pa in September) but the impact on the borrower is huge. Their interest costs have soared. An extra 62cents per $100 borrowed. Just scale that up to the billions and feel the pain! Watch this space. The other interesting space is the optimism that seems to have surged through the JSE investors now that we are enjoying a much more lenient lockdown regime. It’s not at all easy to tease out the specific points of optimism while watching the government appear to make yet another mess of the Covid-19 program. The simplest of sums like how many patients could at best be “jabbed” in a day, divided into the number of people we need to vaccinate = years! And we have yet to start. The prioritising of candidates and the electronic record keeping systems are both genuinely tricky tasks. The dodgy power supply is playing its malevolent part as well. The idea of holding an annual State of the Nation event (SONA) seems to have been borrowed from an era long past and a world where a president had things to boast about. Frankly, here and now, a single short sharp odoriferous word would suffice to describe the current state of this nation. Replete with all the usual wish lists and waffle, the only different item was that he emulated minister Tito Mboweni by introducing a botanical metaphor. Our parttime gonzo chef and finance minister has invoked the common aloe ferox in his recent budget speeches and has even on occasion brought one to parliament in a pot. Cyril chose the fynbos, a uniquely Western Cape biome that requires severe wildfire events in order to regenerate itself, to illustrate the nation’s future. Wisely he refrained from bringing a sample and setting it alight. The pile of resulting ash would probably not have been as illustrative as he wished. In his speech President Cyril assured us that 2021 would be as a year of ‘change, for progress and for rebirth’. He placed fighting Covid-19 as the most pressing priority, alongside rebuilding and restarting South Africa’s flailing economy. One day a smart person is going to find a way of publicly and swiftly matching political promises with outcomes in real time and blowing appropriately themed raspberries. The sole good news about President Cyril’s SONA last night was that someone beforehand must have decided that our local strain of these nasty covid bugs is highly attracted to pageantry and posturing. Consequently, the customary amusing and alarming fashion parade of the great and good, accompanied by the usual complement of crooks, idiots and clowns, was cancelled. There’s a lot of space-related excitement at present as so far this week two craft have arrived at Mars to begin orbiting that planet. A third and much more sophisticated one from NASA will soon attempt to land a rover on the planet. Privacy and quality of life for Martians have gone out the window. Astronomers have discovered the most distant object ever found in our solar system and it has been nicknamed "Farfarout," after the previous record-holder, "Farout," which was discovered by the same astronomers in 2018. Isn’t it nice to know that there are folk for whom the terms load shedding and lockdown appear to have no impact. Unless tagged under weightlifting, the news that three suspects were detained at OR Tambo International Airport at the start of the year after gold bars weighing 73.5kg were allegedly discovered in their hand luggage is not really sport related. But anyone able to hoist 25kg of hand luggage into the overhead locker deserves respect. What did the cop on duty at the X-Ray machine make of that? James Greener Friday 12th February 2021