photo credit: pablo/T Chavez is promising to take over rice processing plants in Venezuela because they have been refusing to sell rice at the price set by government. Hyperinflation is starting to show it’s head, as a function of government policies around money supply. The article I referenced claimed that that is the reason for…
Our memories are too short. It was only a few short months ago that Alan Greenspan’s legacy was being torn apart by critics of his eagerness to prop up bubbles through monetary easing. The critics said that his actions limited short term damage from the bursting of bubbles and economic difficulties only to generate the…
Profit margins are being squeezed by decreased spending power of consumers. That is true, but it is also not the full story. Competitive pressures, buyer and supplier power dictate sustainable margins in the medium to long term. photo credit: abooth202 Fin24.com has a story this morning around Shoprite’s results and pricing strategy going forward. The…
It is entirely possible that I was too optimistic. For once. What I said was: Our house prices will decline further but (political meltdown excepted) I’d bet serious money that we won’t see these declines in 2009 or 2010. I was talking about the 12.4% decline in US house prices in 2008 and the areas…
Moneyweb has an article describing the failure of the South African insurance industry to provide insurance to the wider population, including lower income markets such as the banking sector has done. There are some interesting points to discuss here, and I’m certainly not saying the industry could not do more. However, there are some fairly…
From FT.com Official data showed the UK economy contracted 1.5 per cent in the last three months of 2008, the biggest quarterly slump in 28 years. The figures confirmed that Britain had entered its first recession since 1991. The figures, a preliminary official estimate of output, showed a contraction in services, manufacturing and construction. But…
What do the names Oneway, Bull, Kansvatter, Inthemoney, The Bull! and Millionaire in the making have in common? They’re all optimistic, aggressive names used in the Make A Million competition. They’re also, as of right now, all in the bottom ten out of nearly 300 entrants and have all lost everything but a few rand…
Bodie, Kane and Marcus wrote a wonderful textbook used in finance in universities around the world. I remember reading one of the “boxes” during a lecture at UCT many years ago. It described an ingenious money-making strategy: Start 16 apparently independent investment advisory newsletters. In the first year, 8 of them forecast gold (or oil,…
