A frequent comment about why “property prices will keep going up” is that: They aren’t making land any more Building costs keep going up Our population is growing If these points are true, then this would provide a strong force to push property prices up. It still wouldn’t mean property prices couldn’t decline. Citizens still…
Moneyweb’s article on Barlow’s re-striking of BEE options echos my earlier post on the trouble of underwater incentive options. The sense of the article is that this sets a bad precedent. Of course, the precedent has been set years ago – I’ve personally calculated the additional costs under IFRS2 for BEE deals in danger of…
Brief introduction to Exchange Traded Funds An “ETF” is an “Exchange Traded Fund”. In it’s simplest form, it is: a company… with very specific assets (e.g. gold bullion or a portfolio of shares with the exact weights of a particular index)… listed on (and traded on) and exchange in which one can invest to get…
FNB has confirmed that they will be pulling approvals for home loans on a large scale. Many seem to have been caught by surprise. Fools. To an outsider, it appears that FNB made a mistake in underestimating the trouble in the property market when they first gave these approvals. Their estimates of property price growth,…
I was reading the comments on a recent blogpost on the freakonomics blog. Someone suggested (tongue firmly in cheek, I hope) that if libraries were invented today, copyright enforcement bodies (the DMCA was labelled directly) would hunt down anyone who tried to set one up. The comparison of the lending of books to the piracy…
CNN article on Zim’s currency billion for one consolidation
Zimbabwe’s inflation is accelerating towards Germany’s 1922 record of 204 billion percent. Estimates currently put Zimbabwe’s inflation at between 2.2million and 15million percent. The effect on the exchange rate is proportioate. So what would happen if Zim were to abandon the Zim Dollar and use the South African Rand as legal tender? It is a…
Employee Share Options became popular during the tech boom of the last millenium. They were used before, but the explosion across more companies, across more levels of employees and as an expected part of executive remuneration was a product of the Silicon Valley boom. There are pros and cons for share options. Used correctly, they…
