Minister in the Presidency and head of the National Planning Commission, Trevor Manuel, says he is not in the running for the MD position at the International Monetary Fund. No economic qualifications Oversaw popular decreases in taxes and increase in social handouts but did nothing for infrastructure, competitiveness or efficiency of our country Oversaw the…
The USD value of bitcoins decreased by 30% in one day on Friday. This isn’t the only problem with bitcoins, but it is a natural result of not having a central bank / government behind the currency saying “we are committing to this currency and requiring it to be accepted as legal tender”. There are…
South Africa’s unemployment is a different creature from that in the US and in the developed world’s papers at the moment. We don’t have a cyclical lack of demand (although demand isn’t as robust as I’d like). Â We have massive, unmanaged structural unemployment in large sectors of the economy. I say “in large sectors of…
Prediction: Â Bitcoins will be irrelevant by 2013 and will never emerge from a very small niche market. In fact, they are already irrelevant today. This is what happens when open source supporters, crypto experts and privacy nuts think an understanding of C++ and maths equates to knowledge of economics and monetary systems. Oh, and add…
Commodity prices rise and the world screams hyperinflation. Elsewhere, alternative investment managers espouse the virtues of commodities as an asset class that generates “alpha” returns (i.e. returns not related to the overall direction of markets). The thing is, it’s hard to have it both ways. Â The link between unexpected/expected inflation and equity prices in the…
I’ve had a couple of readers and one ex-student challenge my thinking that deflation was more of a risk than hyper-inflation over the last couple of years and that loose monetary policy and “printing money” (more on that later) is not likely going to lead to massive inflation of everything and the debasement of hard…
The economist magazine compares Big Mac inflation to officially reported country inflation over the last ten years. The aim of their article is to suggest that perhaps China and Argentina have been fudging their inflation figures. However, my attention was drawn to South Africa right near the top of the chart. This suggests that our…
