I’ve just finished watching the successful landing of NASA and JPL’s Phoenix lander on Mars. Previous success rate for landing on Mars was less than 50%. Not great odds by any stretch. Interesting that not only is the Phoenix lander made extensively out of the technology of the failed previous attempt (Mars Polar Lander) but the result of several review boards, and the Phoenix project team’s own review of…
The strange turn of events that saw load shedding suspended seemingly within days of dire warnings around consumption may be coming to an end. Eskom is warning that load shedding may need to resume. I guess it was too soon to pack away the inverters, generator, candles and perpetual motion machines.
Credit and economic risk collide when it comes to debt issued by Eskom. The damage is exacerbated by serious operational and medium-term management issues. Ensuring reliable supplies of raw materials should be a top priortity, but hasn’t been. Moody’s is considering a multi-notch downgrade of Eskom’s foreign and local currency issues. Eskom’s debt is not…
Nationwide Airlines is on the ground. A series of business and operational problems met the global economy of skyrocketing avgas prices and left them insolvent by R172m (assets of R46m less liabilities of R218m). They’ve also left friends of mine stranded in South Africa after a trip from Ireland for another friend’s wedding (congratulations Kay and…
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…
Behavioural finance is no longer a “new idea”. It has entered mainstream finance education through CFA, Business Schools, even actuarial exams (ST5 for UK and South African actuaries). Some of the biggest lessons revolve around how bad we as a species are at making decisions in the face of uncertainty. Emotional biases, overconfidence, loss aversion,…
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”.
