I’ve blogged before that it’s more the cost of electricity and the efficiency of its generation that we should be concerned about rather than the price we ultimately pay. From a national perspective, we pay generation and transmission costs regardless of what the price on our bill is. The profit or loss comes out of…
From the Bureau of Labour Statistics Series Id:Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â LNS11300000 Seasonally Adjusted Series title:Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â (Seas) Labor Force Participation Rate Labor force status:Â Â Civilian labor force participation rate Type of data:Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Percent or rate Age:Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 16 years and over The above graph is possibly the most important number. Â How much economic activity are we losing because US citizens simply aren’t working? The…
The Value of New Business written by an insurers is a good measure of the value created through sales activity over a certain period. It’s not the easiest number to interpret in terms of profitability though. New Business Margin, which is the Value of New Business (VNB) as a percentage of the Present Value of…
Jeremy Cronin’s response to calls for the Fuel Levy to be used to fund Gauteng roads provides no evidence for the existing of thinking. He’s been horribly mis-represented, is a horrible communicator, or is a horrible policymaker – and I don’t even necessarily believe the Fuel Levy is the appropriate way of funding Gauteng roads.…
Airports Company SA, “ACSA” now has some of the highest fees in the world. Apparently they need to fund the huge “investment expenditure” incurred in upgrading on our airports recently for the World Cup. This begs the questions: What business plans were used in determining investment on our airports? How did actual experience compare to…
[Update: for some incomprehensible reason the embedded video clips below only work on YouTube. Click the image for a link to the YouTube page] Andrew Canter (of Future Growth) makes some strong statements about the “phone and dealer” approach to the South African bond market. When one of the arguments against Andrew’s preferred centralised, electronic…
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…
