Debt Relief, mostly for third world countries, gets a fair amount of airplay from time to time. Less so now that the developed world has realised maybe it could do with a little debt relief itself. Debt relief can make sense from a few different directions, arguably for good reasons such as: As a form…
I’ve heard it said (of the US) that there is no national property market, but rather than local property markets are relatively independent of each other. I guess this was more true before 2007 than it is today. Property in one area is a weak substitute for another property in a nearby area, and an…
It’s clear to me that the biggest and longest lasting impact of Apartheid will be the disastrous effect it’s had and is continuing to have on education. We won’t fix employment or economic growth or prosperity (and in a roundabout way many other social ills) unless we have a truly fixed education system. But, passing…
Recently I described how employment in South Africa is a totally different ballgame to that in the US, and as a result needs different strategies to fix. The starting point then is to understand the causes of our structural unemployment in order to figure out how to fix it. Why do we have high and…
We’re doing something wrong in South Africa. India’s economy grew at 8.9 percent in the second quarter, an acceleration from the brisk growth rate posted for the previous three months.
The US is in uproar. Their unemployment* rate is at 9.6% after having briefly flirted with 10.1% a year earlier. It’s predicted to stay around this level for years. The bulk of US unemployment is cyclical. Don’t let anyone tell you different (especially not in 1935). Cyclical unemployment arises when a shock (in this case,…
Don’t believe everything you read, everything you feel. Forget all the mad talk about moving to a new gold standard. It isn’t going to happen. It won’t happen even if the president of the World Bank suggests it might. Why not? Because it won’t work. It doesn’t solve our problems and creates innumerable other problems.…
Venezuela has just nationalised the local arm of a US bottling company. It shouldn’t be long before this example hits the political spehere in South Africa and enters our own debate on nationalisation. The debate really has (or needs to have) two quite distinct elements: Are nationally owned / publicly managed companies and industries better…
