Was enjoying coffee and scones at a Woolies cafe recently. Well, actually I wasn’t enjoying the scones because they had run out. They’ve been making a habit of running out of scones recently. Strange. But the amusing part of this story came from reading the coffee “Things you didn’t know” table thing. Point number 1:…
Up, up and out of reach Food prices are high and getting higher. Some of this can be blamed on the alternate use of crops for biofuel, and some due to the shifting of production towards more biofuel friendly crops. Whether this is a good thing or not would need more discussion than I can…
GDP growth below expectations and Standard Bank is likely to miss it’s already previously downwards revised earnings target. We can’t forecast. Our biases, overconfidence, wild anchoring on anything out there, herding instincts so as not to be wrong and obvious about and general inability to understand how little we know about the future are clear. So if we can’t forecast, and so many of our decisions depend on knowing the future, who are we kididng?
Our economy barely grew in the first quarter of 2008. 2.1% real seasonally adjusted growth is shockingly low given the previous quarter’s 5.3% growth. One needs to stretch back to 2001 to find a lower point of economic growth. Mining down 22% A large part of the problem is the 22% decrease in the economic…
The South African Reserve Bank increased the Repurchase Rate today by 50 basis points. As usual, all the talking heads are out explaining why this was exactly the right thing, exactly the wrong thing, exactly the right thing for the wrong reason and several other combinations. Historical levels of Repo updated graphs – Short memory…
This article isn’t new, although it seems to have some pretty current info (about Excel 2007, for example). Worth a read for anyone who uses spreadsheets for everything, but doesn’t want to touch a database, Mathematica / Maple / Maxima / Octave / Matlab or R / S / S+ etc. http://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/spreadsheet_addiction.html And yes, I…
I guess this has crept up on me slightly. CPIX @ 8.8% for January 2008? Our inflation target range is 3% to 6%. That’s an acceptable gap of 3%, and now we’re nearly that far away from the top of the range? Meanwhile PPI figures have been delayed due to “rebalancing and reweighting”.
I was reading an article about the directors of Imperial and Steinhoff purchasing shares in their respective companies. Steinhoff directors made the news when the CEO originally used Single Stock Futures to gear his exposure to a significant position in the company. (This position has since been converted into a direct position with about the…
