http://www.timeslive.co.za Listen to the latest BusinessLIVE articles from the news desk of Business Day, Financial Mail and the Business Times. This audio is produced directly from the text article. Business News en Thu, 18 Apr 2019 16:58:38 +0200 Tue, 04 Feb 2025 16:59:47 +0200 30 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss iono.fm 2.5.2.0 TimesLIVE Podcasts no Daily feeds@iono.fm (Feed Manager) https://cdn.iono.fm/files/p372/logo_4280_20250910_203038_1400.jpeg http://www.timeslive.co.za Listen to the latest BusinessLIVE articles from the news desk of Business Day, Financial Mail and the Business Times. TimesLIVE Podcasts episodic TimesLIVE Podcasts podcasts@arena.africa false ZA https://iono.fm/e/1524311 https://iono.fm/e/1524311 Business News Tue, 04 Feb 2025 15:28:00 +0200 0 0 New Harmony Gold CEO reflects on his plans for the company in a tough gold market 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 7:42 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/1524313 https://iono.fm/e/1524313 Business News Tue, 04 Feb 2025 15:28:00 +0200 0 0 Department of Trade and Industry talks energy security in Africa 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:51 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/1495542 https://iono.fm/e/1495542 Business News Thu, 24 Oct 2024 15:15:00 +0200 0 0 Toyota Motors SA CEO Andrew Kirby 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 39:20 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/1378472 https://iono.fm/e/1378472 Business News Wed, 08 Nov 2023 16:43:00 +0200 0 0 Ford injects R5bn into production of hybrid-electric bakkies 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 13:17 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923741 https://iono.fm/e/923741
This shows that businesses are planning or have implemented new business practices for a post-Covid-19 world, leading to faster adoption of the internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud-computing, among other technologies to drive digital transformation.

Even before the coronavirus crisis, there was a steady increase in people choosing to work remotely, and many companies have moved to more flexible workplace models. Investigating and investing in these tools will not only be good risk mitigation for the Covid-19 pandemic, but could also allow for easier collaboration, quicker turnaround times and cost savings as a result of less travel.

Companies that have previously embraced future-of-work practices, with virtual resources and technology support for remote workplaces, are well-positioned to sustain their operations and respond quickly to the demands of navigating the crisis.

When done correctly, remote working is effective if you can also restructure the organisational processes for how communication and co-ordination happens. It is therefore vital for companies to tackle a lack of appropriate technology, such as digital devices, virtual collaboration tools and platforms that will support dynamic work locations.

In a post-Covid-19 world, cloud technology is likely to receive a surge in implementation across all types of apps. There are obvious advantages to cloud-based services and infrastructure: they provide the convenience of accessing services from anywhere, any time, from virtually any device. New workflows can be pushed out quickly to enable self-service capabilities and on-the-fly process and configuration changes.

The progression of software and information technology services to the cloud has accelerated strongly over this period, driven by increased use of remote working and the need for maximum scalability in times of uncertain demand and supply of goods. That said, there has been redoubled interest in hybrid-cloud architectures to ensure resilience — something edge-computing also has a role to support.

In the long term, cloud-based solutions are critical for organisations to achieve quicker time to market and create self-service solutions for businesses. As societies and industries have rebuilt, there has been a focus on efficiency, automation and flexibility. The GSMA Intelligence report suggests IoT connections are to double between 2019 and 2025, reaching ... ]]> Business News Sun, 13 Sep 2020 22:08:19 +0200 0 0 Digital innovation no longer up in the clouds 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 6:20 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923734 https://iono.fm/e/923734
The farm invasion comes just a few weeks after the government said it will allow some white farmers that lost their land to the violent land reform programme to return to their farms.

In August Zimbabwe committed to pay $3.5bn in compensation to local white farmers whose land was forcibly taken by the government to resettle black families, moving a step closer to resolving one the most divisive policies of the Robert Mugabe era.

The government also said foreign white farmers settled in Zimbabwe whose land was seized under the controversial programme can apply to get it back and will be offered land elsewhere if compensation proves unworkable.

But on Friday Martin Grobler, who had a farm in Ruwa, 30km outside the capital, Harare, was evicted after he was given 24 hours’ notice.

Grobler said Ivy Rupandi, a government official with the ministry of lands, told him to move out of the property with immediate effect.

Grobler said Rupandi and an accomplice brought a truckload of police officers and a sheriff of the high court before they moved his property from the farmhouse.

“Rupandi told me that she was now the new owner of the farm before they brought a lorry load of people and a sheriff of the court,” he said. “These people told us to move out right away.”

On Friday the ministry of information said it would investigate the issue amid a public outcry over the invasion of the farm.

In a statement, the ministry said: “We have been made aware of a video depicting an eviction of a farmer and his family. Government is trying to establish the facts behind this matter. What is known so far is that there is a legacy legal issue between the parties and the matter is being dealt with by the courts.”

Recently, the government indicated that it was willing to work with evicted white farmers in partnerships to make land productive as vast tracts of land remain underutilised after the land reform programme.

Once a breadbasket of Southern Africa, Zimbabwe’s food production has plummeted, forcing the country to import basic foodstuffs.

A land audit carried out by the government exposed huge irregularities in the allocation of ... ]]> Business News Sun, 13 Sep 2020 20:55:24 +0200 0 0 Another farm invasion in Zimbabwe despite promises 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 2:34 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923717 https://iono.fm/e/923717
The last time we were in this situation, the president was FW de Klerk and the governing party was the National Party. In 1991, the leader needed a strong mandate for change to negate those in his party stopping him from implementing “the will of the people”.

In that situation, De Klerk took the plunge and called for a plebiscite: the “Yes-No” referendum of March 17 1992, where a subset of the population was asked: “Do you support continuation of the reform process which the state president began on 2 February 1990 and which is aimed at a new constitution through negotiation?”

By March 18 1992, De Klerk’s mandate was crystal clear, even in conservative strongholds. Almost 69% of the votes were in favour, advocating for change, and with this clear mandate negotiations continued and we had free and fair elections in April 1994.

President Cyril Ramaphosa could hold a plebiscite with the question: “Do you support continuation of the reform process the president began on February 15 2018, which is aimed at rooting out corruption, implementing the National Development Plan and implementing structural reform aimed at economic growth?”

In the 1992 referendum, participation was not fair and without universal franchise. This could be the case this time as well: the vote could be limited to paid-up members of the ANC. The membership hurdle is only R20, and the election infrastructure could easily be crowdfunded.

Ramaphosa, the ANC leadership, ANC members, all South Africans and the world would finally know what mandate the president has. Hopefully this would remove some stumbling blocks to reform.

Greg Becker

Via e-mail

JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an e-mail with your comments. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Send your letter by e-mail to letters@businesslive.co.za (mailto:%20letters@businesslive.co.za). Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number. ]]> Business News Sun, 13 Sep 2020 19:14:34 +0200 0 0 LETTER: Put Cyril Ramaphosa’s reform plans to the vote 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:58 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923718 https://iono.fm/e/923718
Irony of ironies, Malema was charged for committing a similar offence. Will “Annie Oakley” be treated in similar fashion? Or does cowpoke Juju enjoy political privilege not reserved for ordinary gun-toting citizens?

What’s the bet that the case against Annie will speed through, with a stiff penalty facing her, as opposed to Juju’s, which is bound to drag on.

There’s no question that given the present situation in the country, toting a gun in public must be considered a serious offence. And it is expected from the courts that they’ll impose the same sentence on all culprits.

This is an ideal test case for the judiciary. Or will our law still be considered an ass, with Juju coming off scot-free as usual?

Cliff Buchler

George

JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an e-mail with your comments. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Send your letter by e-mail to letters@businesslive.co.za (mailto:%20letters@businesslive.co.za). Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number. ]]> Business News Sun, 13 Sep 2020 19:14:05 +0200 0 0 LETTER: How will law treat gun-wielding shopper? 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 0:59 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923719 https://iono.fm/e/923719
I have been watching the prominent advertising campaign China has been using in SA’s media, including Business Day, to signal its intentions here. The Dalai Lama would warn us to beware the “promises” of a neighbouring state that divided his beloved country into four pieces, the smallest of which is the only one still called Tibet.

Bloomberg’s feature was a refreshing and well-written report on what happens when the good intentions of a renowned film company collide with the other intentions of a country such as China.

The actual film may never see the big screen if the virus that was born in China continues to rampage around the world, imprisoning people in their own homes. It could have made an excellent documentary highlighting the unfortunate reality of life in the place it was filmed, where “the state has detained as many as 1-million ethnic Uighurs in camps called ‘voluntary education centres’.” I shiver when I think of what would happen to our various ethnic groups here were we to become part of such an empire.

Business Day’s coverage of Disney’s disaster could not be a better warning.

Jane Raphaely

Via e-mail

JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an e-mail with your comments. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Send your letter by e-mail to letters@businesslive.co.za (mailto:%20letters@businesslive.co.za). Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number. ]]> Business News Sun, 13 Sep 2020 19:08:29 +0200 0 0 LETTER: Disney’s disaster a dire warning 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:20 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923712 https://iono.fm/e/923712
What’s different about the increase so far in 2020, however, is that the causes are pretty clear: social isolation and high joblessness brought on by Covid-19. Now instead of focusing mainly on stopping the flow of drugs or improving addiction treatment, the US has gained a new perspective on prevention. And that doesn’t just mean loosening isolation rules, opening businesses, or boosting federal economic aid. Those measures will be needed for some time to stop the pandemic.

No, the broader lens now is on the many primary solutions that can forestall drug abuse. And it’s being helped along by 2020’s social justice movement, which is exposing once again the roots of poverty and despair that lie behind much of the drug problem. In August, the American College of Preventive Medicine took up arms for this cause. It issued a statement that said a “deep ethical imperative” exists to address all the “social determinants” of drug misuse, from race to education to crime.

Prevention programmes must expand far beyond popular approaches such as anti-drug education in schools and the campaign to reduce opioid prescriptions. Current trends towards opioid misuse favour a pharmacological approach rather than one that deals with the complex societal issues that drive the problem. The US must find better ways to strengthen families, end child abuse, provide affordable homes, train people for jobs and improve mental health services.

After many years of a national drug emergency — now made worse by the pandemic — a bright light has finally fallen on the need to find better ways to help people steer clear of drugs. Treatment can begin long before addiction starts, by bringing health, home, purpose and community to everyone. /Boston, September 10

Christian Science Monitor ]]> Business News Sun, 13 Sep 2020 18:46:38 +0200 0 0 CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR: Combating opioid misuse starts with tackling problems at grass-roots level 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 2:14 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923708 https://iono.fm/e/923708
Last week I received a medical invoice dated February 24, an income tax certificate dated February 29 and a pension fund communication from London dated March 1. I also received three letters addressed to the previous occupant of my house who died four years ago. These six envelopes were not even in my letter box, but were found blowing around my front lawn.

Moving mail efficiently is obviously no longer within the Post Office’s competence. I would suggest total privatisation, except that this would undoubtedly lead to some ANC tenderpreneur pocketing yet more of the country’s disappearing millions.

Richard McNeill

Noordhoek

JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an e-mail with your comments. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Send your letter by e-mail to letters@businesslive.co.za (mailto:%20letters@businesslive.co.za). Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number. ]]> Business News Sun, 13 Sep 2020 18:18:17 +0200 0 0 LETTER: No stamp of approval for pathetic Post Office 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 0:55 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923709 https://iono.fm/e/923709
The night before I had been with George Bizos, Jason Brickhill, Miriam Wheeldon, Bongumusa Sibiya, Avani Singh, Michael Power — all lawyers at the Legal Resources Centre (LRC). George, Jason and I were the counsel team, while Miriam and Bongumusa were the attorney team.

George had asked for a lift from Johannesburg to Rustenburg where the hearings would be held. I volunteered. In that three-hour drive he would regale me with stories about past inquiries flowing from the harrowing brutality of the apartheid police: Sharpeville, Soweto, the Harms commission, the Goldstone commission, the Boipatong massacre. He talked about inquests into murders of activists in police custody: Looksmart Ngudle, Steve Biko, Ahmed Timol, the Cradock Four.

George had lived through all of these, from 1960-1993. He thought he would never witness them again. Yet he was wrong. And disappointed. He would recall the familiar excuse of the police: they were under attack; they acted in self-defence; a prisoner jumped out of the window of a 20-storey building; the protesters were a dangerous and armed mob; and so on.

Judges of the past inquiries had excused the conduct of the police. And so too did the magistrates. Faced with incontrovertible evidence of torture, as in the case of Ngudle — the first political activist to die in police detention under apartheid — the magistrate would exculpate the police. They did the same at the Biko inquest, despite the medical evidence pointing to gruesome assault before his murder. The laughable excuse for the murder of Timol — that he committed suicide by jumping off a building — found favour with the magistrate. At Sharpeville, the evidence was that most of those killed by the police had been shot from the back. But the official police line was that they had been killed in a confrontation with the police. The probabilities were that they had been shot while trying to run away from the police.

George recalled that the apartheid police were also notorious for planting weapons at the scene of the crime. They had done so in Sharpeville and in many other incidents that followed it. These barbarous acts, he hoped, had been a thing of the ... ]]> Business News Sun, 13 Sep 2020 18:10:22 +0200 0 0 Travels with George Bizos: how the law threw up some bumpy roads 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 8:24 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923702 https://iono.fm/e/923702
Now that the country has passed its initial coronavirus peak, the city is springing back to life at speed. But numerous questions remain regarding the future of this formerly bustling urban hub. These include the future of Sandton as the most sought-after office hub, and the likelihood of infrastructure projects planned before the pandemic, such as the Gautrain and new highways, still going ahead.

These are questions cities around the world are asking, with varying degrees of optimism. Whether it’s a vision of a better, more affordable London or a dead New York City, devoid of the things that once made it magical, every major city is reckoning with its post-Covid-19 future. And rightly so. Cities aren’t just places where many people happen to live. They’re centres of wealth, innovation and creativity. When the world changes, they shouldn’t escape the chance to reimagine themselves.

Before imagining what a post-Covid-19 Joburg might look like, it is worth reminding ourselves where the city stood before lockdown. After the departure of then mayor Herman Mashaba, the DA lost control of the Johannesburg council (which it held in coalition with the EFF), meaning the new ANC-led council had been in power for just under four months when the country went into lockdown. Before that, there had been a prolonged period of contested power, which meant service delivery was already affected and long-term projects had been put on hold or were in the early stages of being handed over to the new leadership.

As the country’s economic powerhouse, the city had also been shaken particularly hard by the unprecedented levels of load-shedding and general economic stagnation faced by the rest of the country. Hardly surprising then that the commercial real-estate outlook for 2020 was already cautious. Covid-19 only served to highlight how deep some of these structural flaws were and we’re only now beginning to get an idea of how deep the economic impact will be.

But the way we work also changed. Companies that would never have allowed remote working before were suddenly forced to adopt this for the safety of their employees. And while most South Africans are ready to ... ]]> Business News Sun, 13 Sep 2020 18:01:49 +0200 0 0 Will Covid-19 kill off Sandton and other swish business hubs? 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 4:20 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923692 https://iono.fm/e/923692
Contrary to the submissions of some writers and analysts, the DA has always acknowledged the devastating impact racism has had on South Africans. As my colleague, Mike Cardo, MP, pointed out in an article five years ago, race shaped access to opportunity in the past and it continues to do so in the present (“New leader must redefine the politics of non-racism (../../../archive/2015-04-16-review-new-leader-must-redefine-the-politics-of-nonracialism/)”, April 16 2015).

Where the official opposition parts ways with other political parties is our belief that using actual, means-tested disadvantage makes more sense than making race the measure of disadvantage when it comes to redress. The mere fact that the number of unemployed South Africans, the overwhelming majority of whom are black, has increased dramatically over the past two decades is a clear indication that making race the measure for redress is not the solution. The promised “better life for all” remains elusive, except for a small, well-connected elite.

During the coming weeks and months, the DA will be further fleshing out our alternative proposals and taking the message to the public that race-based redress isn’t the only game in town, and that there are other, more effective ways to undo the legacy of our divided past and create the prosperous SA envisaged in our constitution.

Stuart Pringle

Somerset West

JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an e-mail with your comments. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Send your letter by e-mail to letters@businesslive.co.za (mailto:%20letters@businesslive.co.za). Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number. ]]> Business News Sun, 13 Sep 2020 17:48:17 +0200 0 0 LETTER: Race-based redress isn’t the only way 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:48 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923693 https://iono.fm/e/923693
The Black Sash has launched a report carefully analysing the arguments in favour of such a grant, explaining what it could entail, how it could benefit individuals and the economy as a whole, and what the costs and effects could be. Simultaneously, the organisation launched a petition, supported by a considerable number of other non-profit organisations, addressed to the president and ministers of finance and social development. The research report that accompanies the petition suggests how the necessary funding could be achieved.

The subject is so important that it should not be left only to organisations serving the interests of the poorest sectors of our society. Those interested in the topic should include businesses looking for markets, economists exploring different models, investors and entrepreneurs, and all people who seek to live in a society less fraught by division and strife. The petition will gather strength if it is endorsed by a wide cross-section of the population.

The concept of a universal basic income grant, as it has generally been defined, is one of an equal payment made by the state to every person, or citizen, of a country, from birth to death, regardless of whether that person has an income. This confers the dignity of equal status to everyone, eliminates the need for any means test or other qualification (thus saving the state the expense of maintaining a system to administer such tests), reduces the risk of corruption in the administration process, and allows for an immediate end to absolute abject poverty. It creates the incentive for a rapid injection of expenditure into the economy as people acquire the ability to buy food and other necessities.

Those who already have an income from employment or investments could also use the additional spending power to boost expenditure, while increased tax revenue would accrue to the fiscus. The spurt of energy this could bring to the depressed state of the marketplace would be matched by ... ]]> Business News Sun, 13 Sep 2020 17:46:42 +0200 0 0 Why all South Africans should back a basic income grant 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 5:34 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923684 https://iono.fm/e/923684
The new regulations will require licences for nonfinancial companies that do business across at least two financial sectors, and which are designated as “financial holding companies”, the State Council said on its website on Sunday.

The rules will take effect on November 1 and apply to companies with a banking operation and financial assets of more than ¥500bn ($73.1bn), or those without banking operations but have financial assets exceeding ¥100bn.

Companies that meet the criteria but are denied regulatory approval to set up financial holding entities must sell their stakes in the financial companies or give up control, according to the rules.

Chinese authorities are plugging regulatory loopholes and stepping up their efforts to maintain stability as the Covid-19 pandemic pummels economic growth and bad debt piles up.

In 2018, the central bank identified Evergrande, HNA Group, Fosun International and Tomorrow Group, as well as billionaire Jack Ma’s Ant as financial holding companies, putting them under increased scrutiny because of their growing role in the nation’s money flows and financial plumbing.

Companies covered under the regulation will need at least ¥5bn in actual paid registered capital, and that should account for at least 50% of the combined registered capital of their controlled financial entities, according to the rules.

Consumer lending leader

Ant has emerged as a consumer lending leader in recent years with the help of an array of banks. The firm also operates payments systems, owns a stake in an online bank, and runs insurance and wealth management units.

In anticipation of tighter rules, Ant plans to apply for a financial holding licence through its Zhejiang Finance Credit Network Technology unit, according to the prospectus for its initial public offering released in August. Ant is considering putting certain financial entities into the arm to help reduce the potential capital needed under the proposed rules, people familiar with the matter said last year.

In its 2018 financial stability report, the central bank warned that regulating was becoming increasingly complex, with firms rapidly expanding in the financial sector through cross-border alliances and intricate corporate structures, tied together by connected transactions and investments in existing financial institutions.

At end-2016, about 70 central government-owned enterprises had a total of ... ]]> Business News Sun, 13 Sep 2020 17:14:42 +0200 0 0 China plugs loopholes to curb risks in $49-trillion financial industry 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 4:14 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923685 https://iono.fm/e/923685
Instead, Opec and its allies will convene online and reflect on whether the coronavirus has thwarted their best efforts to keep the market afloat.

After reviving crude prices from an unprecedented collapse over the spring, Opec is seeing the recovery stall and fuel demand falter as the deadly pandemic surges again. Prices slipped below $40 a barrel last week for the first time since June.

On Thursday, Saudi Arabia and Russia — the leading members of the alliance — will chair a monitoring meeting to assess whether the vast production cuts, which they started easing in August, are still staving off an oil glut. New signs of exporters reneging on the deal aren’t helping.

“There were some major assumptions built in on where demand and the recovery would be now, and it just hasn’t happened,” said Mohammad Darwazah, an analyst at research firm Medley Global Advisors. “If I’m Opec and if I’m Saudi Arabia, I would be concerned.”

The relapse is a source of acute financial distress for Opec nations, from poorer members such as Nigeria and Venezuela — which need crude prices far above current levels to cover government spending — all the way up to wealthy Gulf monarchies such as Kuwait.

Riyadh and Moscow had expected that a resumption in global economic activity, combined with the supply curbs, would sharply deplete the hoard of surplus oil inventory accumulated during lockdowns. But there are growing signs the market isn’t tightening so fast.

The peak holiday driving season has passed in the US, yet rush-hour traffic is still sparse and crude inventories are stubbornly high. In India, the third-biggest consumer, transport fuel sales remained 20% below year-ago levels last month. Even in China, where refiners binged on crude at the height of the crisis, buying has slowed.

Trading houses are hiring oil tankers on long-term contracts once again to store surplus barrels.

And Libya, which is exempt from the output cuts because of a civil war that’s all but shut down its oil industry, may resume exports soon, according to US officials. The North African country’s production has slumped to less than 100,000 barrels a day from 1.1-million at the end of last year.

The downturn isn’t yet severe enough for Opec to ... ]]> Business News Sun, 13 Sep 2020 17:06:27 +0200 0 0 Opec to meet in the shadow of a stalling oil market 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 4:47 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923418 https://iono.fm/e/923418
Wednesday was “the worst generation day, ever”, said Mary Holstege, a retired software engineer in Cupertino, California, who went solar a year ago. Her system, which puts out 40kWh a day in the summer, barely dribbled out 1.65 — maybe enough to dry a load of laundry.

Others fared worse. Bentham Paulos, an energy policy consultant in Berkeley, called the solar power system he’s had for 10 years “extremely predictable every single day, except this week”. On Wednesday he peaked at about 12W, or enough to light one LED bulb, “and it went away”, he said.

The solar blackouts highlight a cruel irony of life amid California’s climate crisis: over the past few years, homeowners began investing in rooftop systems and batteries to hedge against intentional power outages aimed at preventing wildfires. But now some blazes have become so large they’re effectively shutting down the solar.

A worst-case wildfire scenario could reduce annual solar energy production from affected installations by as much as 2%, according to Dan Whitten, spokesman for the Solar Energy Industries Association. “We take any lapse in solar performance very seriously,” he said, “but the longer term and more serious implications of this environmental devastation are much more alarming and need to be addressed, in part by stronger clean-energy policies.”

It’s not the first time a wildfire-stricken region has seen solar power misbehave, and far from the last. During the Australian bushfires that began last year, months of intense smoke resulted in decreased and harder-to-predict generation from the country's rooftop-solar fleet, said Will Edmonds, a Sydney-based analyst at BloombergNEF. But this had little impact on customers losing power. Most can still draw needed electricity from the grid.

“In fact, several rapidly deployable solar and storage systems were used to restore power to critical infrastructure in some of the worst-affected regions,” Edmonds said in an e-mail.

So far, there’s no sign that smoky skies will erode interest in residential power — and, in fact, the fires and recent utility blackouts may be creating more demand. SunPower, on Wednesday, generated more appointments with potential new customers than all but two other days in a three-year-old sales initiative. ... ]]> Business News Fri, 11 Sep 2020 18:51:36 +0200 0 0 US wildfire smoke blotted out the sun — and solar power 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 4:28 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923419 https://iono.fm/e/923419
About 5km from the Naf River that marks the border between Myanmar’s Rakhine state and Bangladesh, Kan Kya was home to hundreds of people before the army chased 730,000 Rohingya out of the country in 2017 in what the UN described as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.

The Myanmar military, now facing charges of genocide, said it was conducting “clearance operations” targeting militants.

Where Kan Kya once stood, there are now dozens of government and military buildings including a sprawling, fenced off police base, according to satellite images publicly available on Google Earth and historical images provided to Reuters by Planet Labs. The village, in a remote region in the northwest of the country closed off to foreigners, was too small to be named on Google Maps.

On maps produced in 2020 by the UN mapping unit in Myanmar, which it says are based on Myanmar government maps, the site of the destroyed village is now nameless and reclassified as part of nearby town Maungdaw. The unit makes maps for the use of UN bodies, such as refugee agency UNHCR, and humanitarian groups that work with the UN in the field.

Kan Kya was one of almost 400 villages destroyed by the Myanmar military in 2017, according to satellite images analysed by New York-based Human Rights Watch. And it is one of at least a dozen whose names have been erased.

“Their intention is that we do not return,” said religious leader Mohammed Rofiq, a former chairman of a village close to Kan Kya who now lives in a refugee camp in Bangladesh, referring to the Myanmar government.

The ministry of social welfare, which oversees Myanmar’s rebuilding activities in Rakhine state, declined to answer questions from Reuters about the erasure of village names or the government’s policy concerning the return of Rohingya refugees. The ministry referred questions to the General Administration Department (GAD), which did not respond.

A representative of the Myanmar government, led by state counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, also did not respond to a request for comment.

The UN’s map department has produced at least three maps since the start of the year that show a number of Rohingya ... ]]> Business News Fri, 11 Sep 2020 18:33:16 +0200 0 0 Myanmar erases name of Rohingya village razed in 2017 ethnic cleansing 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 9:22 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923420 https://iono.fm/e/923420
The Internal Market Bill is aimed at ensuring Britain’s four constituent nations can trade freely with one another after leaving the EU, but the government says that requires overriding part of the withdrawal treaty it signed with Brussels.

The EU has threatened legal action against Britain, and many lawmakers have voiced concern about the prospect of breaching an international treaty.

What happens next?

The bill must pass through both houses of British parliament to become law, first the House of Commons, where Johnson’s Conservative Party has an 80-seat majority; then the House of Lords, the upper chamber, where it does not have a majority.

The debate will begin after 2.30pm GMT on Monday in the House of Commons, where the principle of the bill will be debated and legislators will decide whether it should go to the next stage.

If passed on Monday, there will be four more days of debate on the bill’s fine print — on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then September 21 and 22. There are likely to be votes on attempts to change the wording and meaning of the law, and a final vote to decide whether it goes to the next stage.

If the bill passes the lower house, it will undergo scrutiny in the House of Lords. This has not been scheduled yet.

Can legislators block or change it in the House of Commons?

Yes, but Johnson’s big majority, won on the basis of pushing ahead with Brexit, makes this difficult.

Any attempt to block or alter the bill requires opponents to assemble a majority in parliament. This would require at least 40 Conservatives rebelling and all opposition parties uniting behind a single position.

The extent of any potential rebellion in Johnson’s party is hard to gauge, but an amendment put forward by Conservative lawmaker Bob Neill is attracting some support. It seeks to give parliament a veto on any decision to breach the withdrawal agreement.

Labour and other opposition parties have yet to set out their own position on this and other amendments.

What about the House of Lords?

Many members of the upper house have criticised the bill, including Conservatives, but their primary role is ... ]]> Business News Fri, 11 Sep 2020 17:57:16 +0200 0 0 What the UK breaching the Brexit treaty means 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 3:14 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923289 https://iono.fm/e/923289
According to a media release from DRC's minister of environment and sustainable development‚ Claude Nyamugabo Bazibuhe‚ three Congolese and a Zimbabwean national have been arrested and are expected to appear in court soon.

Bazibuhe said border authorities in Mokambo on the DRC border said the truck had documents for the exportation for 32 chimpanzees. However‚ when the truck entered custom services in Chirundu‚ on the Zimbabwe border‚ it was found the consignment was not chimpanzees but 29 different species of monkeys.

Bazibuhe said he regretted the incident.

Zimbabwe’s parks and wildlife management spokesperson, Tinashe Farawo‚ speaking on the country's 263Chat radio station‚ said the organisation was working with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) to repatriate the monkeys‚ but would continue to investigate the circumstances.

Smaragda Louw, from SA’s Ban Animal Trading, said authorities in SA were investigating where the animals were destined to be delivered‚ and if they were meant for a private individual. ]]> Business News Fri, 11 Sep 2020 17:52:28 +0200 0 0 Monkeys destined for SA from DRC detained in Zimbabwe 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:15 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923275 https://iono.fm/e/923275
Mitsui OSK Lines also said the ship was using the wrong type of nautical charts as it veered towards the island nation and ran aground on July 25, president Junichiro Ikeda said at a press briefing Friday.

The ship, MV Wakashio, leaked about 1,000 tonnes of fuel when it began breaking apart last month, causing ecological damage as it fouled beaches and mangroves. The spill is expected to impact the marine and tourism industry that employs at least a fifth of the workforce in the Indian Ocean nation.

“The crew lacked awareness of the danger of the ship getting closer to the shore,” Ikeda said, adding that the nautical charts the ship was using at the time didn’t show detailed water depths and that waves from the south were also pushing the ship ashore.

The shipping ministry of Mauritius has completed an interim report that will serve as a basis for further investigations, though it hasn’t been released publicly. A separate report earlier this month by the Panama Maritime Authority said the ship had moved closer to the island to connect to Wi-Fi, Japan’s national broadcaster NHK reported.

Nagashiki Shipping, which owns the ship, said the company is unable to comment on the investigation. “The owner will not comment on these matters until the official process of the law is concluded,” it said in e-mailed responses to questions.

Mitsui OSK (MOL) also said on Friday that it’s committing ¥1bn ($9.4m) partly to help with the clean-up in Mauritius. About ¥800m will go into a fund over the next few years for the environmental recovery and protection of biodiversity, including mangroves, coral reefs and seabirds.

About ¥100m will go to NGOs and other groups in Mauritius, while the remainder is earmarked for expenses, including setting up an office in the country. Nagashiki Shipping will also donate money to the fund.

Bloomberg ]]> Business News Fri, 11 Sep 2020 17:26:12 +0200 0 0 Mauritius spill caused in part by a lack of awareness and Wi-Fi 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 2:05 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923421 https://iono.fm/e/923421
The haves get the bulk of the attention. Harvard University made news when it decided to make classes largely online, and again when many freshman deferred enrolment. With its immense endowment, Harvard will be fine. So, too, will the school’s typical student, who comes from a household with an income that is three times the national median. Privilege for the privileged.

The “have nots” are the ones we need to worry about. Among the 19.7-million undergraduates who were expected to enrol this year, less than 0.5% would have attended an Ivy League school, while millions would have gone to college part-time and to two-year institutions. Moreover, when the have nots attend college, they get less out of it than the haves.

Individuals who drop out of college are half as likely as those who complete a bachelor’s degree to say that the benefits exceeded the costs. It is even worse for those who attend private for-profit colleges, are the first in their families to go to college, or are people of colour.

The Covid-19 pandemic will exacerbate the disparities in educational outcomes, much as the Great Recession did. In 2008, attendance shot up at private for-profit colleges, and total student loan debt climbed, reaching $1.7-trillion this year. Delinquencies rose, too, especially among low-income students. The adverse effects were wide ranging and long lasting, with many young adults held back from starting families and buying homes. A repeat in 2020 will hold the next generation back.

Education remains the main path for the less privileged to attain advancement and financial security. Juan Salgado, chancellor of the City Colleges of Chicago, spoke at a US Federal Reserve conference in 2019 on ways to strengthen the pathway. He shared a powerful video in which Sam Villalobos, class of 2018, described the middle-class as the “classic American dream”.

Chloe Caston-Sanders, a current student, noted that “not everyone is OK with a minimum wage job” and we need “pathway programmes to doctors or careers that aren’t easily accessible”. ... ]]> Business News Fri, 11 Sep 2020 16:24:36 +0200 0 0 The US education gap between the haves and have nots is only getting worse 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 5:24 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923214 https://iono.fm/e/923214
The report came as Reuters reported that one of Biden's main campaign advisory firms had been warned by the software giant that it was in the crosshairs of the same Russian hackers who intervened in the 2016 US election.

The Microsoft statement highlights how advisers to both presidential campaigns are at risk from digital spies around the globe, as the two candidates face off on November 3 in one of the most consequential US presidential elections in decades.

The announcement by Microsoft’s vice-president for customer security, Tom Burt, said the group accused of breaching Hillary Clinton’s campaign e-mails in 2016 — a Russian military intelligence-linked unit widely known as Fancy Bear — had spent the past year trying to break into accounts belonging to political consultants serving both Republicans and Democrats as well as advocacy organisations and think-tanks.

Burt also said Chinese hackers had gone after people “closely associated with US presidential campaigns and candidates” — including an unnamed Biden ally who was targeted through a personal e-mail address and “at least one prominent individual formerly associated with the Trump Administration”.

He added that Iranian hackers — which Microsoft has already called out publicly for attempts to spy on a US political campaign that Reuters identified as being Trump’s — had since tried to log into accounts belonging to Trump administration officials and members of the Republican president’s campaign staff.

Microsoft’s announcement was planned before Reuters broke the news that Fancy Bear was suspected of targeting Washington-based SKDKnickerbocker, a campaign strategy and communications firm working with Biden and other prominent Democrats.

Burt did not name any of the political consultants involved and Microsoft declined to comment on whether SKDK was among the consultants it had identified as targets.

SKDK has declined comment.

Burt said the Chinese effort to compromise the Biden ally and the Iranian spying against the Trump campaign were unsuccessful, but his blog post provided no detail on the hacking campaign attributed to Russia or the effort to compromise the well-known former Trump associate.

Speaking generally, he said that foreign hacking was intensifying as the vote drew nearer.

“The activity we are announcing today makes clear that foreign activity groups have stepped up their efforts targeting the ... ]]> Business News Fri, 11 Sep 2020 15:53:49 +0200 0 0 Microsoft warns of foreign hackers’ spying attempts on Trump and Biden 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 4:03 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923157 https://iono.fm/e/923157
A Barcelona hospital is letting its Covid-19 patients out into the sun, partly in a bid to increase their vitamin D intake, after a Spanish study suggested it reduces intensive care unit (ICU) admissions. The study was published in the Journal of Steroid Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, and participants were divided into two groups. The control group received standard care and the second group were given vitamin D supplements. Half of the control group were admitted to ICU, and two died. However, in the vitamin D group, only one out of 50, or 2%, required ICU admission and no-one died.

Earlier studies have disproved a link between vitamin D and better Covid outcomes.

2. Toe the party line

German scientists believe Covid-19 may justify a three-year ban on house parties. Since lockdown restrictions have been lifted around the world, a spike in cases has been associated with gatherings and parties. They say gatherings will need to stop completely in order to lower infections.

In the US, five students from the State University of New York organised a party that resulted in over 500 new cases just a few days later. In the UK, a resident was fined £10,000 after hosting a party of nearly 100 people.

3. Doctors on strike

Nigerian doctors in state-run hospitals have begun an indefinite strike over pay, overcrowded facilities and a lack of personal protective equipment, AFP reports. The action by the National Association of Resident Doctors, which represents 40% of doctors, is the latest in a string of stoppages by medics to hit the country. Nigeria has over 40,000 resident doctors in state hospitals. Their other demands include life insurance coverage and payment of unsettled wages. Authorities fear a reduction in capacity could severely hamper its ability to tackle the pandemic as Covid-19 case numbers continue to rise. ]]> Business News Fri, 11 Sep 2020 14:43:13 +0200 0 0 DINNER PARTY INTEL: Soak up the sun 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 2:02 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923170 https://iono.fm/e/923170
His argument centred on three inter-meshed but analytically distinct issues. He reasoned that, with the current high debt levels, SA cannot spend its way to growth as fiscal multipliers are low and that potential growth has been slowing from 4% (2009) to 1% (2019).

He went on to ascribe the above negative outcomes to structural constraints and unsustainably high government spending that led to high debt, which constrains growth. Structural reforms and fiscal consolidation, Mboweni warned, are the best way to achieve growth.

Disquietingly, economists have squabbled over the sizes of multipliers, a matter difficult to settle due to modelling differences, but have not faulted Mboweni’s core reasoning.

However, not only is Mboweni and the Treasury’s reasoning deeply erroneous, it is frozen in a corrupted conceptual structure that has successfully undermined economic enfranchisement of the majority. It also undermines growth, debt sustainability, employment creation and structural transformation. It is the source of the mess SA sits in.

Here is how their structural reforms faux pas is constructed: SA’s declining potential output growth is ascribed to falling total factor productivity (TFP). Potential output is the maximum level of output that can be achieved without triggering inflationary pressure, and TFP, the major constituent component of potential growth, is the efficiency with which factor inputs (factors of production) are utilised.

To raise potential growth — what the Treasury and the Reserve Bank aim to achieve — declining productivity must be arrested then raised. They see potential output, a critical construct in the design and management of macro-economic policies, as determined exclusively by supply forces (factor inputs and productivity), therefore, only supply measures (structural reforms) must be employed to raise potential growth.

According to their logic, demand or demand factors, no matter how strong, can only cause temporary deviations in potential output, so there is no need to use demand interventions. This seemingly well laid out mainstream argument is fatally flawed and lacks empirical confirmation.

As high merchants of myths, deaf and blind to macro-economic science, Mboweni and his ilk, whose ideological default mental setting is on structural reforms, deliberately ignore empirical evidence that unambiguously implicates the effects of demand and demand factors not just on production, but potential growth and productivity.

That financial crises ... ]]> Business News Fri, 11 Sep 2020 14:28:47 +0200 0 0 Demand factors count and ignoring them will preclude growth 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 8:25 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923129 https://iono.fm/e/923129
But it was only when she encountered it in Italy’s mainly white fashion industry that she realised just how unwilling people are to talk about it.

Now Jean, whose brightly coloured skirts and dresses are worn by celebrities including Beyoncé and Rihanna, says she can no longer remain silent in the face of what she sees as a rise in racially charged incidents in Italian fashion.

The former model, a protégé of Giorgio Armani and the only black person ever to be appointed to Italy’s influential Fashion Council, will not show her latest collection at Milan Fashion Week later this month in a protest over racism.

“As the first and only black designer in the history of the Fashion Council, it is my responsibility to explain to those who haven’t noticed the extreme marginalisation in which my minority lives,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “An entire generation of new Italians ... have lived for too long in a condition of total invisibility.”

Italian fashion houses have been criticised in recent years for creating products deemed racist, including Gucci’s 2019 “blackface” sweater with a mouth cut out and trimmed in red, and Prada’s 2018 keychain of a monkey with inflated lips.

Jean said that while discrimination has been an “uncomfortable and punctual travel companion” in her life, she only encountered it in the fashion industry recently, when she raised questions of race. When she did so, she found that “broaching the subject of racism in Italy is to this day still an unconfessable taboo”.

Italy is whiter than most other European countries and there has been relatively little debate over the country’s colonial past, racism or integration.

About 9% of Italy’s 60-million registered residents are foreigners but of these, less than half a million come from Sub-Saharan Africa.

Last week, Italy’s foreign minister Luigi Di Maio drew criticism for sharing “blackface” memes of himself on his Facebook page, a response to a wave of earlier memes that surfaced when he appeared in public with a deep sun tan.

Signs of progress

Jean said there has been years of silence and denial around questions of race in Italy. Earlier this year, she released a film showing Italian women of black and Asian origin revealing the racist ... ]]> Business News Fri, 11 Sep 2020 13:45:51 +0200 0 0 Black Italian designer calls out racism in fashion industry 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 3:36 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923094 https://iono.fm/e/923094
The remains of two victims have been found in ruins from the blaze, which erupted on Tuesday and roared through a third day in the midst of a spate of wildfires across Oregon, according to a spokesperson for the state fire marshal.

More bodies are expected to be discovered as search teams comb through the wreckage of dwellings that were engulfed during a chaotic evacuation of populated areas along the path of the swiftly spreading flames, Ashland police chief Tighe O'Meara said.

"We tried to get people out as fast as we could," O'Meara said by phone. "Chances are there are going to be bodies in some of those homes. The likelihood of much larger [fatality] numbers is significant."

The blaze, dubbed the Almeda fire, originated on Tuesday morning in Ashland, a city of about 21,000 residents in southern Oregon just 26km from the California border that is home to Southern Oregon University and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

The flames, driven by high winds, did relatively little damage to Ashland but quickly spread out of town and into neighbouring communities along Bear Creek before roaring through the adjacent towns of Talent and Phoenix toward Medford, a city of 82,000 residents, O'Meara said.

He cited local news media estimates that roughly 600 homes were destroyed but added, "easily hundreds of homes were lost".

Reuters video footage from the fire zone showed kilometres of burnt-out vehicles, flame-scorched ruins of gutted buildings and twisted debris lining state highway Route 99 in between Ashland and Medford.

The area was off-limits to evacuees, but here and there individuals and couples were seen trudging along the roadway with arm loads of belongings they apparently had managed to salvage from the wreckage of their homes.

Police in Medford as well as in Douglas County to the north cautioned against rumours that left-wing antifascists and right-wing Proud Boy extremists were starting the fires.

Rich Tyler, a spokesperson for the state fire marshal's office, said separately that it was not immediately clear whether any of the fires raging across Oregon this week were deliberately set.

"Every fire is investigated for the possibility of arson so that we can either determine ... ]]> Business News Fri, 11 Sep 2020 12:58:27 +0200 0 0 US police open arson probe as more deaths expected in Oregon 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 3:13 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923095 https://iono.fm/e/923095
Biden and his wife Jill will first attend a morning ceremony in lower Manhattan in New York, where al-Qaeda hijackers flew two aircraft into the World Trade Center’s twin towers. Republican vice-president Mike Pence will also be on hand for the ceremony.

Trump will speak at a morning ceremony at the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, a White House official said. The event, in remembrance of the 40 passengers and crew who died when the plane plunged into a field after they struggled with the hijackers, will be closed to the public because of coronavirus concerns, the National Park Service said.

Later in the day, the Bidens will visit the Shanksville site to pay their respects to the victims. The two candidates are not expected to cross paths in Pennsylvania, a battleground state that is vital to the November 3 election between Trump and Biden.

Flight 93, bound for San Francisco from Newark, New Jersey, never hit its intended target — the four hijackers were believed to be planning to crash it into either the US Capitol or the White House — after passengers stormed the cockpit and attempted to regain control of the aircraft.

In all, nearly 3,000 people died in the September 11 2001, attacks, which also included a fourth hijacked plane that slammed into the Pentagon outside Washington.

The ceremonies marking the attacks are a regular stop for presidential candidates and officials. Trump visited Shanksville for the 9/11 anniversary in 2018, and has attended memorial ceremonies at the Pentagon.

Biden went to memorials in Shanksville during his years as vice-president under Barack Obama.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton both visited the Ground Zero Memorial and Museum in New York on the anniversary of 9/11.

Biden’s campaign said it is pulling its TV ads off the air on Friday to commemorate the anniversary of the attacks.

The non-profit 9/11 Day had asked both campaigns to pull its ads. The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment on whether it would do so.

Reuters ]]> Business News Fri, 11 Sep 2020 12:54:22 +0200 0 0 Trump and Biden to commemorate of 9/11 attacks 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 2:19 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923096 https://iono.fm/e/923096
Brent was down 12c, or 0.3%, at $39.94 a barrel by 8.41am GMT, after falling nearly 2% on Thursday, while US crude dropped 3c, or 0.1%, to $37.27 a barrel, having fallen 2% in the previous session.

Both benchmarks were 6% down for the week.

“Financial markets are continuing to set the tone, including on the oil market. The renewed slide on US stock markets dragged oil prices down with it,” Commerzbank analyst Eugen Weinberg said.

Heavyweight tech-related stocks resumed their decline on Thursday as the number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits remained high.

“Stock markets dived, oil followed, and Brent lost 15% of its value in five trading sessions as money managers liquidated,” oil broker PVM's Tamas Varga said.

Also dampening the market mood, the US Senate killed a Republican bill that would have provided about $300bn in new coronavirus aid.

Fears about an oversupply also added to the general feeling of uncertainty, Weinberg said.

In the US, stockpiles rose last week, against expectations, as refineries slowly returned to operations after production sites were shut down due to storms in the Gulf of Mexico and the wider region.

US crude inventories rose 2-million barrels, compared with forecasts for a 1.3-million barrel decrease in a Reuters poll.

In a further bearish sign, traders were starting to book tankers again to store crude oil and diesel, amid a stalled economic recovery as the Covid-19 pandemic continues.

Increasing stockpiles are likely to be a subject at a meeting on September 17 of the market monitoring panel of oil cartel Opec and allies, including Russia (Opec+).

Opec+ has been withholding supply to reduce stockpiles, but analysts say the meeting is likely to focus on compliance among members, rather than seek deeper cuts.

Following Saudi Arabia, Kuwait also lowered its official selling price to Asia for October, to counter slower demand.

Reuters ]]> Business News Fri, 11 Sep 2020 12:51:22 +0200 0 0 Oil falls for second day as US stockpiles rise again 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 2:21 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923068 https://iono.fm/e/923068
Elevated fears over a messy hard Brexit added to the bearish sentiment, putting sterling on track for its worst week since March after the EU told Britain it should urgently scrap a plan to break their divorce treaty.

In other political wrangling, the US Senate on Thursday killed a Republican bill that would have provided about $300bn in new coronavirus aid, as Democrats seeking far more funding prevented it from advancing.

That followed European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde earlier in the day appearing to rule out measures to weaken the euro.

“Investors were disappointed,” said Milan Cutkovic, market analyst at AxiCorp. “They were hoping that the central bank will boost the stock market rally by paving the way for further stimulus measures and talking down the euro. But ECB president Christine Lagarde sounded less dovish, and her remarks about the strong euro left markets unimpressed.”

The pan-European Stoxx 600 opened lower before gaining 0.2%. MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan added 0.4%, moving away from a one-month trough touched earlier this week. Japan's Nikkei rose after Tokyo dropped its coronavirus alert by one notch from the highest level as Covid-19 cases trend down.

US futures were higher, pointing to a recovery on Wall Street after losses on Thursday put the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite on course for a second straight week of losses. On Friday, Nasdaq 100 futures were up 1.3% and S&P 500 futures 0.9% firmer.

The NYSE Fang+ index of big 10 tech companies. NYFANG has lost 5.4% so far this week — its biggest weekly loss since the market turmoil in March if sustained by the end of Friday.

Still, the index is more than double its March trough and investors have gathered that their high valuations are justifiable in light of near zero interest rates in much of the developed world and huge liquidity the world’s central banks have created.

Many investors have said the selloff was a healthy correction.

Yet, with the world's stocks still trading near the most expensive levels relative to profit outlook since the 2000 tech bubble, some analysts called for caution.

“Global shares had rallied on expectations of economic recovery from lockdowns. But as the autumn begins (in the ... ]]> Business News Fri, 11 Sep 2020 12:17:44 +0200 0 0 Global shares struggle after US tech stocks fall again 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 4:51 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923079 https://iono.fm/e/923079
Germany, which counts on China as a key pork market, confirmed a case of African swine fever on Thursday. That’s already caused South Korea and Japan to suspend purchases, and Taiwan to begin inspecting the luggage of passengers from the European nation.

A Chinese import ban on German suppliers or specific areas where the disease was found is inevitable, said Ma Chuang, deputy secretary-general at the Chinese Association of Animal Science and Veterinary Medicine.

The German case was detected in the corpse of a wild boar near the Polish border. A ban by China would deal a further blow to Germany, which has been struggling with the pandemic’s economic impact, and comes just days after China said it’ll resume pork imports from some German meat works that were earlier affected by the coronavirus.

China, the world’s top hog producer, has also been battling swine fever at its own farms since first reporting an outbreak in 2018. That pushed the nation into a supply shortage after the disease slashed herds by about a half, driving up the country’s pork prices and meat imports to record highs.

Germany was China’s third-largest supplier of pork in the first half of 2020, after the US and Spain. A reduction in German supplies may benefit producers including the US and Brazil, whose exports to China have been booming, said Lin Guofa, a senior analyst at Bric Agriculture Group.

The German outbreak will lead China to reduce its imports from the country, as was the case for Belgian supplies in a similar case in 2018, Ma said. However, it will have a limited impact on the Asian nation’s breeding stock, as it buys those mostly from France and Denmark.

Bloomberg ]]> Business News Fri, 11 Sep 2020 12:01:01 +0200 0 0 China likely to halt German pork imports due to case of African swine fever 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:51 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923037 https://iono.fm/e/923037
The French leader’s verbal volleys have already lost a certain je ne sais quoi due to repetition. At Thursday’s gathering in Corsica of the leaders of the MED7 — France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus and Malta — Macron called for European countries to establish “red lines” for Turkish provocations.

But we’ve already heard this before. Indeed, only a couple of week ago, Macron was claiming to have already drawn those red lines, and boasting that Turkey would respect actions, not words. But his actions thus far — whether participating in military exercises in the troubled waters or hosting summits — have only earned him more scorn in Ankara.

The Turkish foreign ministry, no slouch at sharp rhetoric, responded to the French president’s latest salvo with an enfilade of its own: Macron, it said, should quit trying “to give lessons by speaking pedantically with his old colonial reflexes”. Turkey conducted military exercises of its own in northern Cyprus last week: they were dubbed “Mediterranean Storm”.

This leaves Macron with two options: put up, or shut up. He can send more French warships to waters already teeming with naval activity. (Oh look, the Russians have turned up, too.) But it is hard to imagine this will force Erdoğan into recalling his naval and exploration vessels.

France can’t hope for much military support from Nato partners against a fellow member. Though the US has eased a long-standing American embargo on arms sales to Cyprus, it isn’t likely to endorse sterner measures against Erdoğan, who has President Donald Trump’s ear.

Macron can keep up with his philippics against Erdoğan, but these have already passed the point of diminishing returns. The Greeks and Cypriots will soon tire of French expressions of solidarity, and Ankara might enjoy bandying more words with Paris.

And what of Berlin? Germany currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency, and Chancellor Angela Merkel is trying to bring about a negotiated solution to the dispute between Turkey and Greece. Though the EU has ... ]]> Business News Fri, 11 Sep 2020 11:28:59 +0200 0 0 Macron should stop talking Turkey because Turkey will just keep talking back 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 3:35 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923018 https://iono.fm/e/923018
In countries such as South Korea, Indonesia, Pakistan and Poland, confidence in vaccines has declined in recent years, according to a study published on Thursday in The Lancet medical journal. Although support for inoculations in Europe remains low compared with other regions, there are signs that trust is rising in Finland, France, Italy, Ireland and the UK, the report found.

The authors said they believe their research — based on more than 284,000 adults surveyed in 149 countries between 2015 and 2019 — is the largest effort to date to measure global faith in vaccines.

Political instability and religious extremism in several nations are fuelling scepticism, while the spread of misinformation threatens to disrupt vaccination programmes worldwide, the study found. Declining confidence can lead to delays and discourage people from getting shots, contributing to outbreaks of diseases including measles, polio and meningitis.

“It’s been very volatile,” Heidi Larson, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who led the research, said in an interview. The report can help determine “where there’s going to be more trust-building and preparedness needed for Covid vaccines.”

The issue is playing out differently across the world.

The number of people strongly disagreeing that vaccines are safe rose significantly in six countries including Azerbaijan, Afghanistan and Serbia, according to the findings. In the Philippines, concerns over a dengue vaccine triggered a sharp loss of confidence that also appeared to affect uptake of routine shots, according to the research.

Poland and France

In Poland, an organised antivaccine movement pushed the percentage of people strongly agreeing that shots are safe down to 53% in 2019 from 64% a year earlier, the authors wrote. Yet in France, where confidence in vaccines has been low, it surged to 30% from 22% in the same period.

Support has climbed in the US with more people speaking out against the antivaccine movement, according to Larson. Still, as developers sprint to come up with a Covid-19 shot, new surveys have revealed hesitancy in the country and other parts of the globe. In a Gallup poll in August, about a third of Americans said they would not get a vaccine when it became available.

US surgeon-general Jerome Adams earlier this week flagged the importance of working ... ]]> Business News Fri, 11 Sep 2020 11:01:24 +0200 0 0 Trust in a Covid-19 vaccine varies widely, and that could be a deadly problem 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 3:09 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922996 https://iono.fm/e/922996
Körner said: “I’m going for GlaxoSmithKline. I think it’s an amazing OTC [over the counter] portfolio and strong in vaccines. It also has a good pharma portfolio and I think it’s a well-run business.”

Kruger said: “I’m going to specifically focus on Apple. It’s been one of the strongest performers up to date in the US market, has a strong business.” ]]> Business News Fri, 11 Sep 2020 10:52:51 +0200 0 0 WACH: Stock picks — GlaxoSmithKline and Apple 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 0:37 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922972 https://iono.fm/e/922972
Much of what the Trump team has laid out in recent weeks sounds like campaign promises made four years ago: stopping outsourcing and bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US, ending dependence on China for crucial inputs and supporting companies that make things in America.

“Under my administration, we’ll end our reliance on China once and for all,” Trump said on Labor Day. “And we’ll impose tariffs on companies that desert America to create jobs in China and other countries. If they can’t do it here, then let them pay a big tax to build it someplace else and send it into our country.”

Yet, despite hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs that the US levied against China, sanctions imposed on Chinese officials and actions to restrict the Asian nation’s technology companies, the vast majority of American firms have no plans to pack up shop in China and come back to the US.

“There hasn’t been any kind of transformational shift on the part of multinational corporations away from China sourcing,” said Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, a non-partisan partnership formed by US manufacturers and the United Steelworkers. “Is 3M still making respirators in China as well as the US? Yes, they are. Does Apple have any plans to divest from China? Not that I’m aware of.”

Only about 4% of the more than 200 US manufacturers surveyed by the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai said they will shift any production to the US, a report showed on Wednesday. More than 75% said they do not intend to move production out of China, while 14% said they will shift some operations to other countries.

In a separate US-China Business Council survey, 87% of the more than 100 canvassed American companies said they have no plans to shift production out of the Asian nation, citing long-term confidence in that market.

‘Rampant’ cheating

While Trump’s campaign has not offered much detail on how he would bring back jobs from China in a second term, it cites other actions — such as tariffs on more than $300bn of the country’s products — as successes in dealing with what it terms “China’s rampant trade cheating.”

“The ... ]]> Business News Fri, 11 Sep 2020 10:23:35 +0200 0 0 Trump’s rehashed promises on China risks giving Biden the upper hand 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 5:38 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922958 https://iono.fm/e/922958
This audio is produced directly from the text article. ]]> Business News Fri, 11 Sep 2020 10:00:01 +0200 0 0 By the numbers: How the lockdown affected mobility in SA 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 0:10 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922960 https://iono.fm/e/922960
This audio is produced directly from the text article. ]]> Business News Fri, 11 Sep 2020 09:50:06 +0200 0 0 By the numbers: Seismic shift in power generation 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 0:10 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922929 https://iono.fm/e/922929
It could have been the desperate migrants, dwelling in cramped tents without clean toilets and forced by Covid-19 to “quarantine,” whatever that may mean in such conditions. It could have been local Greeks, who resent what they see as a slum that sullies their beautiful island. Or the fires could have flared all by themselves, because in such a wretched place, bad things are just bound to happen.

Either way, Europe — from Brussels to Berlin, Budapest, Warsaw and Athens — is responsible for this tragedy. This is blowback for one of the EU’s worst failures on an admittedly long list: its inability to fix a broken refugee system.

It’s been clear for many years that migration from poor and war-torn regions in the Middle East and Africa to this comparatively orderly continent would be one of the EU’s biggest challenges. But most member states that can’t be reached by dinghy, raft or boat across the Mediterranean — and only Greece, Malta, Italy and Spain can be — refused to acknowledge migration as their problem.

Apply for asylum

The result was the notorious and cynical “Dublin system”. It requires migrants, at least in theory, to apply for asylum only in the first EU member state they physically enter. Unless they jet in by plane — and Syrians who’ve been bombed out of their homes tend to flee without boarding passes — this means the Mediterranean states.

The resulting dysfunction came to a head exactly half a decade ago, during the refugee crisis. In the summer of 2015, Syrians, Afghans and others fled to Greece, which was itself suffering from the euro crisis. From there the migrants walked across the Balkans towards Germany and the north — until many of them were stranded at a train station in Budapest.

Instead of helping, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban blocked them. On their nightly news that summer, Europeans watched families sleeping on platforms and train tracks and walking along highways towards the German border.

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, decided that turning back these refugees was not an option. Neither Germany nor the world, 70 years after the Holocaust, wanted to see Germans in uniform fencing in downtrodden and helpless people. So she let them in. Journalists ... ]]> Business News Fri, 11 Sep 2020 09:24:36 +0200 0 0 Europe to blame for burning of Moria refugee camp 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 5:34 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922889 https://iono.fm/e/922889
Spot gold was down 0.8% at $1,938.53/oz at 3.08am GMT, after hitting its best level since September 2 at $1,965.94/oz on Thursday. Gold has gained 0.4% this week. US gold futures fell 0.8% to $1,948/oz.

“A rebound in the US dollar index sent gold prices lower following the European Central Bank’s neutral tone last night,” said Margaret Yang, a strategist with DailyFX, which covers currency, commodity and index trading. “The mid- to-long-term outlook remains bullish for gold, despite recent consolidation. An ultra-loose monetary policy and low yield environment is cushioning the downside.”

The dollar index bounced back on Friday after a steep drop against the euro in the previous session and was on track for its best week since mid-May. A stronger greenback makes gold more expensive for holders of other currencies.

Casting a shadow over hopes for a quick economic rebound, US weekly jobless claims hovered at high levels last week, suggesting a slowing labour market recovery. Gold prices have climbed 28% this year as governments and major central banks pumped huge stimulus into the economy and kept interest rates low to alleviate the economic toll of the coronavirus.

The US Senate blocked a Republican bill that would have provided about $300bn in new coronavirus aid, as Democrats push for more funding. Investors’ focus will now shift to British GDP data and US inflation data due later in the day.

Elsewhere, silver dropped 1.2% to $26.61/oz and palladium lost 0.7% to $2,278.86/oz. Platinum eased 0.4% to $922.43/oz, but was heading for its best week since the week ending August 7, up 3%.

Reuters ]]> Business News Fri, 11 Sep 2020 08:20:53 +0200 0 0 Gold dips as dollar gains ground 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 2:13 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922870 https://iono.fm/e/922870
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan dipped 0.2%, hovering just above a one-month trough touched earlier this week. Japan’s Nikkei rose 0.3%.

Souring the mood, the US Senate on Thursday killed a Republican bill that would have provided about $300bn in new coronavirus aid, as Democrats seeking far more funding prevented it from advancing.

“The need for more fiscal support seems obvious, but the chances of imminent support have diminished significantly,” wrote Rodrigo Catril, senior FX strategist at National Australia Bank in Sydney.

Data also showed the number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits remained high last week, and the total number of people who are on unemployment benefits increased to 29.6-million.

Diplomatic and military tensions between Washington and Beijing appeared to intensify as Taiwan denounced China on Thursday over large-scale air and naval drills off its southwestern coast.

US tech shares, unquestionable leaders of the world’s stock recovery since late March, failed to sustain a brief rebound.

On Wall Street on Thursday, the S&P 500 lost 1.77% while the Nasdaq Composite dropped 1.99%, both on course for a second straight week of losses.

The NYSE Fang+ index of big 10 tech companies has lost 5.4% so far this week, its biggest weekly loss since the market turmoil in March if sustained by the end of Friday.

Still, the index is more than double its March trough and investors have gathered that their high valuations are justifiable in light of near zero interest rates in much of the developed world and huge liquidity the world's central banks have created.

Many investors have said the sell-off was a healthy correction.

Yet, with the world’s stocks still trading near the most expensive levels relative to profit outlook since the 2000 tech bubble, some analysts called for caution.

“Global shares had rallied on expectations of economic recovery from lockdowns. But as the autumn begins [in the northern hemisphere], people wonder if the coronavirus infections could worsen,” said Kozo Koide, chief economist at Asset Management One.

“You never know if vaccine deployment is that easy nor if banks need to put aside more provisions for struggling firms in the hospitality sector. Considering all that, investors are likely ... ]]> Business News Fri, 11 Sep 2020 07:54:58 +0200 0 0 Asian shares falter as sell-off on Wall St resumes 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 3:59 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922860 https://iono.fm/e/922860 Business News Fri, 11 Sep 2020 07:47:37 +0200 0 0 Lockdown day 168: Latest Covid-19 numbers 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 0:17 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922861 https://iono.fm/e/922861
Brent crude was down 18c, or 0.5%, at $39.88 a barrel by 3.37am GMT, after falling nearly 2% on Thursday, while US crude dropped 14c, or 0.4%, to $37.16 a barrel, having fallen 2% in the previous session.

Both major benchmarks are down about 6.5% for the week and headed for a second week of declines, as hopes dim for a steady recovery in fuel demand amid signs of a second wave of coronavirus outbreaks.

In the US, stockpiles rose last week, against expectations, as refineries slowly returned to operations after production sites were shut down due to storms in the Gulf of Mexico and wider region.

“While US crude oil production continues to recover after Hurricane Laura, the numbers show that refineries further reduced run rates over the last week,” ING Economics said in a note.

US crude inventories rose 2-million barrels, compared with forecasts for a 1.3-million-barrel decrease in a Reuters poll.

In a further bearish sign, traders were starting to book tankers again to store crude oil and diesel, amid a stalled economic recovery as the Covid-19 pandemic continues unabated.

Onshore storage remains near capacity as supplies continue to outpace demand, so the use of so-called floating storage is back in vogue as cheap financing costs and the spread between contracts for delivery now and later months makes it favourable for traders to hold oil for later sale.

Increasing stockpiles are likely to be a subject at a meeting on September 17 of the market monitoring panel of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) and allies including Russia, a group known as Opec+.

The grouping has been withholding supply to reduce stockpiles but analysts say the meeting is likely to focus on compliance among members, rather than seek deeper cuts.

Reuters ]]> Business News Fri, 11 Sep 2020 07:32:03 +0200 0 0 Oil extends losses on demand concerns 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 2:06 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922851 https://iono.fm/e/922851
Tech stocks have fared well so far in 2020, and have been under pressure in September, in what some analysts said was an inevitable correction.

What the European Central Bank (ECB) on Thursday did was upbeat regarding the eurozone’s economic outlook, analysts said, but failed to fully address concerns about a stronger euro, analysts said.

The ECB was less dovish than anticipated but the single currency failed to hold onto its gains as Brexit risks mounted and US stocks staged an early reversal, said BK Asset Management MD for foreign exchange strategy Kathy Lien in a note.

In morning trade the Shanghai Composite was down 0.21% while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was up 0.5%.

Tencent, which influences the direction of the JSE via Naspers, had added 0.99%.

Gold was down 0.3% to $1,939.61/oz while platinum had fallen 0.28% to $924.91/oz. Brent crude was up 0.5% to $39.91 a barrel.

The rand was 0.22% firmer at R16.85/$.

Global focus is on US inflation data later, while locally, atmospheric gases group Afrox is due to release its half year results to end-June later, warning in a recent trading update that profits had been hit by disruption from Covid-19.

gernetzkyk@businesslive.co.za (mailto://gernetzkyk@businesslive.co.za) ]]> Business News Fri, 11 Sep 2020 07:03:26 +0200 0 0 JSE faces mixed Asian markets on Friday 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:40 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922776 https://iono.fm/e/922776
A confirmed case of African swine fever has been identified in the eastern state of Brandenburg, agriculture minister Julia Kloeckner said on Thursday at a briefing in Berlin. The virus, which kills most infected pigs within 10 days but is not harmful to humans, was detected in the corpse of a wild boar found near the Polish border.

Tests were conducted at Germany’s animal health institute and sensitive areas will now be cordoned off to try to prevent the disease spreading, Kloeckner said.

A key supplier to China, the largest consumer, Germany had stepped up efforts to prevent the disease from entering the country since it emerged in western Poland late in 2019. That included training dogs to sniff out dead wild boar, stockpiling electric fences along the eastern border and urging drivers not to toss ham-sandwich scraps out the window.

Eastern Europe has dealt with African swine fever outbreaks for several years, and neighbouring Belgium has also seen cases in wild animals since 2018.

The African swine fever case in Brandenburg deals a further blow to Germany as it struggles with the coronavirus pandemic. A nationwide lockdown plunged the economy into its worst recession since World War 2 and activity is not expected to return to pre-crisis levels until the end of 2021 at the earliest.

Germany’s largest pork plant was shuttered for a month after more than 1,000 workers tested positive for Covid-19, and additional abattoirs also faced temporary closures from outbreaks. That’s kept output below normal levels and meat producers throughout Europe and the Americas saw similar problems as abattoirs became hotspots for the virus.

German pork exports to countries outside the EU stand to be disrupted as it no longer meets the requirements of most veterinary certificates, according to the DBV farm lobby. Sales within the bloc are still possible under certain conditions.

A verified case could bring German exports outside the EU to a “fairly rapid halt,” Justin Sherrard, an animal-protein strategist at Rabobank, said before Kloeckner’s announcement. That may benefit sales from other European shippers, including Spain or Denmark, as well as US, Canada or Brazil.

That would come at a time when Chinese purchases have been surging as the nation attempts to rebuild its own herds after ... ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 23:47:24 +0200 0 0 First case of African swine fever found in Germany 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 4:27 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922766 https://iono.fm/e/922766
Names that have rallied since March lows, such as Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.com, all fell.

Tesla rose slightly, initially helping to limit the Nasdaq's losses before the tech-heavy index's slide widened.

The NYSE FANG+TM Index, which includes the core FAANG stocks, also fell, and all 11 sectors of the S&P 500 traded lower.

Wall Street's main indices bounced back sharply on Wednesday from their biggest three-day rout since March, as investors returned to tech-focused stocks that are deemed insulated from the current economic downturn.

The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits remained high last week, labour department data showed, as layoffs and furloughs persisted across industries.

In addition, the US Senate on Thursday killed a Republican bill that would have provided about $300bn in new coronavirus aid, as Democrats seeking far more funding prevented it from advancing.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in an interview with Fox News the electoral outcome for control of the Senate could go either way.

“It’s more of this sort of stew of stuff than has come together than any one particular thing you can point to, and maybe most importantly you are looking at an extended market,” said Stephen Massocca, senior vice-president at Wedbush Securities in San Francisco.

Massocca cited election uncertainty and the length of time it may take the economy to fully reopen due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 405.89 points, or 1.45%, to 27,534.58, the S&P 500 lost 59.77 points, or 1.76%, to 3,339.19 and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 221.97 points, or 1.99%, to 10,919.59.T

The S&P tech index was one of the weaker performers on Thursday afternoon, stumbling 2.28%. Despite the recent pullback, the tech index is up about 24% in 2020, far outperforming the benchmark S&P 500's rise of 3.5% in the same period.

A few notably large, bullish tech-related options positions in Facebook, Adobe and Netflix were partially unwound on Thursday, in line with more cautious sentiment towards tech names, according to Christopher Murphy, co-head of derivatives strategy at Susquehanna Financial Group.

Many market participants view the sell-off as a bout of turbulence rather than the start of a deeper ... ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 22:58:51 +0200 0 0 Wall Street closes lower as tech stocks resume fall 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 3:29 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922815 https://iono.fm/e/922815
At the annual Tax Indaba this week, Keith Engel, the CEO of the SA Institute of Tax Professionals, spoke of the contribution which transactional taxes could make to close the gap.

As it turns out, there is quite a bit of room for extra collections from the tobacco industry — in large part due to hidden tax perks the industry secured for itself.

A bizarre Swiss agreement

Switzerland, curiously, exports almost as many cigarettes as it does chocolates — nearly 2 billion packs a year. As much as 75% of that is exported to Japan, Morocco and SA.

Now, I really couldn’t tell you the business rationale for SA importing cigarettes from Switzerland, given its own domestic capabilities and its proximity to tobacco powerhouse Zimbabwe. Nonetheless, in 2014, 74% of SA’s imported cigarettes came from Switzerland. By 2018, this had increased to 87%.

But there’s one possible explanation for why so many SA cigarettes are imported from Switzerland — home to the 3 biggest tobacco companies in the world: there’s a big incentive to do so.

The European Free Trade Agreement stipulates that if SA imports cigarettes from Switzerland, there is no duty payable — yet a 45% duty is slapped on imports from anywhere else.

In other words, importing tobacco from Switzerland is 8 to 9 times cheaper than doing so from anywhere else.

As trade analyst Donald MacKay points out, SA’s bilateral agreement with Switzerland includes 22 tariff headings, but imports are only made against five of them — small volumes of cheese, vegetable extract, pet food, animal feed — and enormous volumes of cigarettes.

Consider that between May 2019 and April 2020, SA imported R4m of cheese from Switzerland, R3m of pet food — and R600m of cigarettes. In fact, 98% of the imports under this “trade agreement” with Switzerland relate to cigarettes, rendering it one of the more peculiar trade agreements the country has ever concluded.

Unless, perhaps, the original purpose of this bizarre deal was to create a preference for tobacco, and the rest was simply padding to hide the true intent of the deal, it’s a bizarre agreement with little apparent commercial substance.

This isn’t the only cushy deal the tobacco industry has negotiated ... ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 22:50:19 +0200 0 0 TELITA SNYCKERS: How SA loses from tobacco’s hidden tax breaks 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 5:36 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922763 https://iono.fm/e/922763
Between May and July of 2020, Derkach released edited audio tapes and other unsupported information with the intent to discredit US officials, the department said in a statement on Thursday. Three other people associated with the Kremlin-linked Russian troll farm Internet Research Agency were also sanctioned.

Derkach met with Giuliani in Kiev, even as top Ukrainian officials avoided the US president’s unofficial emissary. Giuliani’s actions in the country later factored into Trump’s impeachment.

Leaked recordings allegedly featuring Democrat Joe Biden, released in a heavily edited version by the Ukrainian legislator, involve phone conversations between Biden — at the time Barack Obama’s vice-president — and then-Ukrainian leader Petro Poroshenko. Derkach has previously said he got the files from investigative journalists.

“Derkach and other Russian agents employ manipulation and deceit to attempt to influence elections in the US and elsewhere about the world,” Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin said in the statement. “The US will continue to use all the tools at its disposal to counter these Russian disinformation campaigns and uphold the integrity of our election system.”

Though Trump regularly scoffs about “Russia-Russia-Russia”, dismissing evidence that Moscow sought to intervene in the 2016 presidential campaign to help him win, the president also often boasts that “nobody’s been tougher on Russia” than his administration. The action on Thursday may bolster that argument as the question of foreign interference again hangs over the election in November.

Democratic legislators said the sanctions action only underscored their criticism of Trump for failing to act forcefully against Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.

“This designation is long overdue and a pressing reminder that Putin and his cronies continue to try to interfere in our elections,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement. “The Trump administration has not done nearly enough to counter Putin’s sustained attack on our democracy, relying instead on these one-off sanctions, a whack-a-mole approach that does little to deter Putin and his oligarchs.”

Derkach and Giuliani did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The department said in its statement that Derkach “has been an active Russian agent for over a decade, maintaining close connections with the Russian intelligence services”.

On the tapes, Biden ... ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 22:40:09 +0200 0 0 US sanctions ‘Russian agent’ in Ukraine who worked with Rudy Giuliani 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 5:00 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922816 https://iono.fm/e/922816
“You could have a very big surprise coming up ... The people of the world will be happy,” Trump told journalists on Monday. “We’re going to have a vaccine very soon, maybe even before a very special date. You know what date I’m talking about.”

It’s not the first time he’s raised hopes that a vaccine will be rolled out before the November 3 election either. On Friday, he reportedly said a vaccine could be ready “maybe even before November 1” or “sometime in the month of October”. And the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) informed state authorities last week that they should be ready to distribute a vaccine by November 1.

Only, it’s probably all wishful thinking.

As Dhruv Khullar notes in the New Yorker (, Larry Corey, who is co-ordinating clinical trials for federally-backed vaccines, puts the timeline at about seven months from July – so February next year. Optimistically, it could be December.

Moncef Slaoui, head of the improbably named “Operation Warp Speed” vaccine programme, says there’s a “very, very low chance” of approval before election day.

And, of nine companies rushing to roll out a vaccine in the US, only Pfizer has suggested it may have results from late-stage tests in October, Ed Silverman writes on health news site Stat ( But even that is far from certain. And, needless to say, those results are still a substantial step behind distribution of any vaccine.

So it’s Shrodinger’s vaccine: at once ready to roll, and not.

It’s also vintage Trump: should a drug be ready ahead of the election, he’ll claim all the credit. If not, he’ll lay the blame at the feet of the regulatory authority. He’s already laid the groundwork for that: in yet another unhinged tweet last month, he accused the “deep state” Federal Drug Administration (FDA) of intentionally slowing vaccine approval until after the election.

It is, of course, cynical politicking, but it also raises the fear that political expediency is trumping public safety.

As Stat reports, a new poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows 62% of Americans ... ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 22:39:07 +0200 0 0 SHIRLEY DE VILLIERS: Will we really have a vaccine by November? 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 6:14 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922796 https://iono.fm/e/922796 Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 22:21:44 +0200 0 0 Lockdown day 168: Pictures of the day 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 0:09 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922758 https://iono.fm/e/922758
He generously gave of his time to me and the many other candidate attorneys that passed through the doors of the organisation over the years.

He would happily spend time discussing matters we were having difficulty with, offer training in trial advocacy and give us the opportunity to assist with matters he was working on. It was a standing feature of the candidate attorney induction week to spend an afternoon with Bizos.

He was always engaging and jovial during these sessions and considered it important to assist and mentor the young members of the profession.

With the LRC being a walk-in law clinic, there were many occasions that potential clients met with Bizos in the lift or in the corridors on his way to lunch at the nearby coffee shop.

Bizos was polite and never turned anyone away — he listened patiently, always offering words of kindness and encouragement and more often than not ensuring that he and the LRC team assisted in some fashion. There were many occasions when Bizos listened to the plight of clients and was reduced to tears, that was the nature of the man.

In the early years of my career Bizos taught me that compassion and empathy had an important place in our profession and if we were unable to understand the pain and injustices suffered by our vulnerable clients, we were not going to convince a judge of it either.

In later years I had the privilege to work with Bizos in preparation for and during the reopened inquest into the deaths of both Ahmed Timol and Neil Aggett.

He joined the bar in 1954 and represented victims of apartheid throughout his career. At the height of apartheid Bizos courageously took on the establishment by representing detainees and the loved ones of detainees who had died at the hands of the notorious security police.

Bizos knew what he was up against then: a police force built on secrecy, lies and torture that acted with impunity and whose actions were sanctioned, enabled, and aided by the judiciary and other arms of government.

His phone at chambers was tapped; the security police held hours of mock trial to prepare for his cross examination; he was routinely followed and his car was tampered with. The security police were cleared ... ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 22:16:18 +0200 0 0 George Bizos made heroic choices every day for 64 years 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 3:56 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922742 https://iono.fm/e/922742
Klein was giving evidence at the commission of inquiry into state capture on Thursday. Her evidence was centred on the controversial departure from the power utility of three top executives in 2015.

The executives, CEO Tshediso Matona, director of finance Tsholofelo Molefe and group capital head Dan Marokane, were suspended in March 2015 by the then Zola Tsotsi-led board.

Tsotsi testified earlier this week that the idea had emanated from former SAA chair Dudu Myeni during a meeting at the Durban state house with president Jacob Zuma.

Matona, Molefe and Morakane were paid a combined sum of R18.2m to leave Eskom.

Asked on Thursday why the board opted for exit settlements instead of reinstating the executives, Klein said R18.2m was not a big deal — much to the surprise of commission chair deputy chief justice Raymond Zondo.

“A company [Eskom] with a turnover of R375m per annum and R30m daily operational costs, I do not know how we conclude that R18m is comparative,” said Klein.

“We were on a burning platform, we were sitting with no money and there was pandemonium.

“The board had deliberated long and hard. I was convinced by the chair [Tsotsi], he told us as the board that the presence of the executives could hamper the inquiry,” said Klein.

“I absolutely supported the inquiry. The chairperson Mr Tsotsi gave us reasons why he believed the suspensions should happen.”

Asked what her opinion was on the matter and if she put it across at the meeting that took the resolutions, Klein said: “When a board has made a decision, then you go out and execute on what the board had agreed. I had agreed that I support the suspensions.”

The suspension of the executives influenced Eskom’s investment rating downgrade.

Klein added that with hindsight, she acknowledged that “some of the decisions we made could have been better made”.

TimesLIVE ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 21:17:16 +0200 0 0 R18m exit package given to three Eskom executives was no big deal, says Venete Klein 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 2:14 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922797 https://iono.fm/e/922797
While Ramaphosa does a large number of public events and answers questions in parliament with regularity, taking questions from the press is an important part of accountability. Journalists — if they take their privileged position in society seriously — should be able to raise the concerns of the public directly with the highest office in the land. The president has agreed to increase the frequency with which he takes media questions in the future and generously acknowledged that he too gains from the interaction.

So how did he do? Ramaphosa plays the statesman role well. He has gravitas and decorum and is disarming when confronted with hostility. He enjoys interacting with people and is used to a warm and fuzzy relationship with the press. So it was unlikely that he had expected the extent of the criticism of his leadership on Wednesday evening. The repeated theme of the questioning was: why is everything taking so long? Why is it taking so long to execute economic reforms that have been on the agenda for years? Why is it taking so long for the criminal justice system to put anyone on trial for the appalling corruption that has crippled the state for the past decade? Why do you need to consult forever?

The tone was markedly different from the last interaction six months ago.

When Ramaphosa began his presidency in February 2019 he underplayed the damage that had been done to both the state and the economy by a decade of Jacob Zuma rule. It was after all his own party that had wrought the damage, while he had looked on passively for much of the time. Ramaphosa eventually did let it slip that SA had experienced “nine wasted years”, in what looked like an unguarded moment, but the overwhelming thrust of his message to South Africans was that “a new dawn” was upon us and that economic growth “was just around the corner”.

Ramaphosa now sees he can’t bluff his way through anymore. In his interaction with the press on Wednesday he described the state he had inherited as “wrecked”, suffering from the “incapacity of a war zone” and that SA had been “on a one-way ticket to complete dysfunctionality”. From now on his concern ... ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 19:31:58 +0200 0 0 EDITORIAL: Carry on like this, and Ramaphosa will be no hero history 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 3:41 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923110 https://iono.fm/e/923110
It urged Beijing to rein in its armed forces.

China, which claims democratic Taiwan as its own, has stepped up military exercises near the island, in what Taipei views as intimidation to force it to accept Chinese rule.

Yeh Kuo-hui, from Taiwan's defence ministry's operations and planning department, told a hastily arranged news conference that China's intentions could not be predicted.

“We must make all preparations for war readiness,” Yeh said, following a news briefing from senior officers describing the Chinese activities over the past two days, and showing a map of Chinese movements.

The drills took place in Taiwan's air defence identification zone, between mainland Taiwan and the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Islands, the ministry said. Taiwan says China sent advanced Su-30 and J-10 fighters to participate.

Taiwan deputy defence minister Chang Che-ping said the drills threatened regional stability and endangered international aviation, he said.

“We once again say, do not underestimate the military's determination to defend our home. We are confident and capable of defending the country,” Chang said.

Taiwan's foreign ministry said the government had shared “information related to China's threat to key friendly nations”, a likely reference to the US, Taiwan's main arms supplier and most important international backer.

China's defence ministry did not respond to a request for comment. China has held numerous military exercises up and down its coast and near the island in recent weeks.

Taiwan has this week been carrying out live-fire weapons tests off its southeast and eastern coast.

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen has warned of a rising risk of accidental conflict, saying communication must be maintained to cut the risk of miscalculation.

Reuters ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 19:04:38 +0200 0 0 Taiwan lambastes China after military drills enter its defence zone 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 2:01 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/923111 https://iono.fm/e/923111
The blaze began in the shattered duty free zone of the port, prompting some residents to flee the city still traumatised by last month’s explosion.

Army helicopters dropped water as firefighters battled on the ground to bring the blaze under control. By evening, officials said most flames had been extinguished. Smoke still rose from smouldering wreckage but it was far less dense.

“For sure we were scared, it’s only been a month since the explosion that destroyed Beirut. We saw the same thing happening again,” Andre Muarbes said as soot and ash fell on vehicles and buildings across parts of the capital.

Officials said no-one had been injured, but the blaze strained nerves already on edge in a nation grappling with a deep economic crisis that has posed the biggest threat to Lebanon’s stability since its 1975-1990 civil war.

Michel Najjar, public works minister in the outgoing government, which resigned in the wake of the blast, told Lebanon’s MTV that initial indications suggest the blaze was sparked by welding work during repairs at the port.

A military source said it appears to have started when cooking oil caught fire and spread to stores of tyres. At one point, live television footage had shown flames licking up near a pile of tyres in a warehouse ruined by last month’s explosion.

The August 4 blast killed about 190 people and injured 6,000.

Majed Hassanein was taking his wife and two children out of the capital by car during the height of the blaze. “I am forced to get them out of Beirut from the smoke and the fire that is happening at the port again.”

His son, he said, is still suffering from shock due to the blast that ruined a swathe of the capital near the port, leaving about 300,000 people without habitable homes and shattering windows across the city.

The head of Lebanon’s Red Cross George Kettaneh said there were no injuries but some people suffered shortness of breath.

The public prosecutor ordered an immediate investigation. Many Lebanese are frustrated that they have not been told about any initial findings from an investigation into the port blast, more than a month after it ripped ... ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 18:56:31 +0200 0 0 Blaze at Beirut port mostly contained but alarms residents 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 2:50 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922798 https://iono.fm/e/922798
The past weekend saw the DA offer its considered counter to the ANC, but the policy’s birth has not been without considerable controversy. It followed in the wake of the departure from the party over recent months of important major black leaders in the party — Mmusi Maimane, Herman Mashaba and John Moodey — who distanced themselves from the prevailing thinking in the upper echelons of the party.

The crux of the argument is whether race should be used as a proxy for disadvantage. Maimane, Mashaba and Moodey all believed it should be, but current leadership — John Steenhuisen, Helen Zille and Gwen Ngwenya (backed now by the delegates at the party’s first policy conference this past weekend) — have voted to eradicate race from the equation and opt for complete non-racialism.

Proponents of the change believe it is a matter of principle that the party must adopt, and that it will not dent support for the party among black voters. Support for the disadvantaged in society would be provided for in other aspects of policy and would not be assessed on a racial measure. It would do away with the ANC’s abuse of the BEE policy, which has been used to establish a new black economic elite without aiding the bulk of the poor in any way.

The abuse of the BEE policy by the ANC is there for all to see — so many of its leaders are now fat-cat examples of BEE.

Since the removal of apartheid in the 1990s the ANC has aimed to realise the goals of its hugely idealistic and impractical Freedom Charter, adopted a generation earlier. It has stepped back from applying aspects of that policy, for practical reasons, without abandoning or amending them.

The charter set out to establish a society in which the banks and mines would be nationalised and land given to all landless people, the national wealth would be restored to the people, and all would have the right to occupy land “wherever they choose”.

All people would have the right to be decently housed, slums would be demolished and new suburbs built where all would have transport, roads, lighting, playing fields, crèches and social centres.

A quarter of a century after the ANC ... ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 18:23:04 +0200 0 0 BEE is a form of race discrimination, but can the DA do better? 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 7:09 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922631 https://iono.fm/e/922631
Speaking after the ECB kept its pandemic bond-buying programme unchanged at €1.35-trillion and the deposit rate at -0.5%, Lagarde said officials would “carefully assess incoming information, including developments in the exchange rate, with regard to its implications for the medium-term inflation outlook”.

Bloomberg earlier reported that the governing council agreed to adopt a weaker phrasing about the euro’s appreciation than it did during the last bout of gains.

The single currency was up 0.7% at $1.1881 at 4.53pm Frankfurt time. That’s close to the two-year high it reached when it climbed above $1.20 last week.

A stronger currency weakens inflation by cutting the cost of imports, and undermines output by making exports less competitive. In January 2018, after the euro had risen to about $1.24, then-president Mario Draghi said that volatility in the exchange rate “represents a source of uncertainty” that needed to be monitored.

The euro has soared more than 10% against the dollar since March, and inflation has turned negative for the first time in four years.

“Clearly to the extent that the appreciation of the euro puts negative pressure on prices, we have to monitor carefully such a matter, and this was extensively discussed,” Lagarde said, while repeatedly stressing that the ECB did not target a particular exchange rate.

“The ECB today engaged in an interesting, possibly risky, verbal balancing act,” said Carsten Brzeski, chief economist at ING Germany. The central bank “seems to be concerned about the stronger euro but not too concerned just yet. At least not everyone at the governing council.”

Lagarde also disclosed new projections, showing policymakers now expected the economy to contract 8% in 2020 — slightly less bleak than its outlook three months ago — before rebounding 5% in 2021. Price growth will accelerate slowly and is still seen averaging only 1.3% in 2022, far below the central bank’s goal of just under 2%.

In a survey before Thursday’s decision, analysts predicted the ECB will increase its emergency bond plan by about €350bn later in 2020 and extend it by six months. The programme is now scheduled to run through to June 2021, and Lagarde said it ... ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 18:08:26 +0200 0 0 Christine Lagarde not anxious to shift European monetary policy 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 3:35 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922632 https://iono.fm/e/922632
Some $3bn has been contributed so far, Guterres told an online event on Thursday, calling it “seed funding” that is less than 10% of what the WHO wants for the programme.

Financial support has, so far, lagged goals, as nations or governments, including the EU, Britain, Japan and the US, reach bilateral vaccine deals, prompting Guterres and WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to plead to nations to contribute.

“We now need $35bn more to go from ‘start up’ to ‘scale up and impact’,” Guterres said at a meeting of a council formed to help the ACT Accelerator gain traction. “There is real urgency in these numbers. Without an infusion of $15bn over the next three months, beginning immediately, we will lose the window of opportunity.”

The total sought, $38bn, is more than the previously published $31.3bn ACT goal and includes, for the first time, additional funding for health systems, in addition to vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics, a WHO spokesperson said.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen pledged backing, having, in August, already promised €400m to the Covax vaccine portion of the programme.

“It is difficult to find a more compelling investment case. The European Commission will remain deeply and entirely committed to the success of the ACT Accelerator,” Von der Leyen said. “The world needs it; we all need it.”

Tedros renewed calls for scaling up Covid-19 clinical trials. AstraZeneca suspended late-stage trials on its potential vaccine this week after an illness in a participant in Britain.

Reuters ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 18:05:15 +0200 0 0 UN needs $35bn more for WHO Covid-19 ACT programme 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 2:08 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922633 https://iono.fm/e/922633
The union said 53-year-old Dlamini, a police officer by training and service, was elected councillor at the borough of Howick municipality, which is now the Umgeni local municipality, in the early 1990s.

Dlamini had also served as the council’s deputy council clerk.

Years later, Dlamini was elected the union’s regional secretary and deputy provincial chair and ultimately the union’s KwaZulu-Natal provincial chair.

He also served as the Cosatu deputy provincial chair in the province.

In 2012, Dlamini was elected Samwu’s first deputy president, a position he held until his re-election at the union’s 11th national congress in 2015. In April 2019, Dlamini was elected the union’s president in Mangaung.

“We lower our banners in honour of comrade John, we salute him for the dedication, love, passion and commitment that he had for Samwu, its members and workers in general.

“We send our heartfelt condolences to the Dlamini family, friends, colleagues, members and municipal workers in general,” the union said.

It said funeral and memorial service arrangements will be made in consultation with the family and will be communicated in due course. ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 17:51:41 +0200 0 0 Samwu president John Dlamini dies 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:20 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922616 https://iono.fm/e/922616
Olaf Scholz, the Social Democrat candidate for chancellor, gambled with the party’s centre-left identity by joining a grand coalition with Merkel’s conservatives after the party’s worst post-war electoral defeat in 2017. He hopes to revive its fortunes in an election in which Merkel has said she will not stand.

But his chance of succeeding her depends on a reputation as a social justice campaigner, which has been undermined by criticism of his handling of two of the biggest corporate fraud scandals in German history: one dating back years to a stint as a mayor, and one on his watch as Merkel’s finance minister.

Lawmakers say Scholz failed to reveal a series of private meetings he had as mayor of the city of Hamburg with the then chair of the bank Warburg, at a time when the city was slow to claw back more than €40m from a tax fraud.

Scholz has denied using his influence as mayor to slow down city officials demanding back the funds, owed after the exposure of the CumEx-Files tax scam, in which fraudsters evaded billions of euros in tax by having two entities claim to own corporate shares simultaneously.

In a meeting with lawmakers, Scholz conceded that he had held meetings with the bank’s chair, though he said he could not recall the details, according to people who attended.

A spokesperson for Scholz said he had nothing to add about the affair beyond his previous public denials of wrongdoing. Warburg said it had since repaid €50m.

Enormous weakness

“It is remarkable that a person of his intellect shows such enormous weakness to remember ... [when] the matter starts to get interesting,” said Florian Toncar, an influential member of the Bundestag from the pro-business Free Democrats.

Fabio De Masi, a lawmaker from the Left party, said he had asked Scholz in March about meetings he may have had with the bank. “He said there was nothing more than what was already known. Now he admitted there were other meetings. Why did he hide this?”

In the other big scandal, Scholz has presided over the finance ministry during the collapse of the payments firm Wirecard, which went bankrupt after acknowledging that ... ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 17:43:10 +0200 0 0 Scandals taint Angela Merkel’s possible successor in Germany 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 2:41 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922598 https://iono.fm/e/922598
George himself had joined the LRC in 1991, spending almost three decades at the organisation. I joined the Constitutional Litigation Unit (CLU), where he was also based, as a junior attorney, then became an advocate and left as the unit’s director.

George used to enjoy introducing me to people as his “boss” and observing their bemused reactions. We became close colleagues and friends, within the extended LRC and public-interest community.

Towards the end of George’s LRC years, he was reunited with his dear friend, Arthur Chaskalson, until Arthur passed away in 2012.

George used to enjoy telling the tale of how Arthur more or less tricked George into giving up his private practice and joining the LRC full-time during the constitutional transition. The two were strikingly different personalities, but shared a deep, loving friendship.

For me, they personified the two dimensions of the LRC’s mission — Arthur representing the strategic use of the law to tackle structural injustice, and George the law clinic’s function of providing daily, unglamorous legal support to every person who walked through the door. These two dimensions made the LRC one of the world’s leading public-interest law centres, and epitomised these two great friends.

Throughout his time at the LRC, George drew a modest salary, probably less than a tenth of what he would have earned in private practice. Indeed, George was appalled to hear what many advocates and attorneys in private practice charge and earn.

Arthur would spend one day a week at the LRC after his retirement as chief justice. On those days, George and Arthur would take the junior LRC advocates out to lunch at George’s beloved Café Boccaccio in downtown Johannesburg.

George would share Greek greetings with Vaitsa and Archie, who ran Boccaccio, and exchange gardening advice. During lunch, George and Arthur would share stories from the past, and grapple with the current challenges facing SA.

The walks to and from lunch always took about twice as long as they should, because we would be stopped several times by people who knew George. They would remind him that he had represented them or a family member during a political trial under apartheid. The memory would flash back to him, and he would share some detail of the case, and take ... ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 17:33:02 +0200 0 0 George Bizos, to the end a warrior for justice and the constitution 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 6:16 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922599 https://iono.fm/e/922599
For those with a long memory, this all sounds very familiar. Egypt’s 1979 treaty with Israel was also attended by questions over weapons purchases. Indeed, President Anwar Sadat’s decision to make peace helped pave Egyptian access to US arms and military aid after he had downgraded ties with the Soviet Union and expelled Soviet military advisers. The two deals have something else in common: they reduced pressure for a peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

But the echoes between them don’t travel much farther than that. While normalisation between Israel and the UAE is expected to lead to substantial trade between both countries, there was no such windfall for the first Arab nation to officially recognise Israel. Four decades after the historic peace treaty, economic relations between the signatories are mainly limited to some high profile natural-gas deals and Israeli tourism to Egypt.

This contributes to the common characterisation of Israeli-Egyptian relations as a “cold peace” rather than a genuine friendship: co-operation and engagement between them has been limited. The reasons for this can be traced back to the historical trajectories and motivations that brought about the 1979 treaty.

The two countries had been at war with each other four times in the three preceding decades. Egyptian and Israeli families had lost loved ones in the fighting. On each side, military and security agencies were used to regarding the other as a threat. The treaty allowed both countries to secure increased financial support from the US while ending any serious risk of another war, but it never fully dissolved the distrust between them.

Throughout the negotiations and since the signing of the treaty, Egypt deepened its economic relations with the West, securing growing sums of aid, loans and investments. While Egyptian and Israeli governments developed robust security co-operation, there was little interest in building deep economic ties.

The US tried to address this by establishing Qualified Industrial Zones in Egypt in 2004 that allowed duty-free access to the US market for goods produced with at least 10.5% Israeli input, but ... ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 17:26:35 +0200 0 0 Israel-UAE trade will overtake deals with Egypt 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 5:03 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922600 https://iono.fm/e/922600
Initial jobless claims in regular state programmes were unchanged at 884,000 in the week ended September 5, labour department data showed on Thursday. Due to a change in the methodology for seasonal adjustment earlier in September, the figure is directly comparable only to the prior week.

Continuing claims — the total number of Americans claiming ongoing unemployment assistance in those programmes — rose 93,000 to 13.4-million in the week ended August 29.

The median estimates in a Bloomberg survey of economists called for 850,000 initial claims in the latest week and 12.9-million continuing claims. Before the pandemic, initial claims were running at about 212,000 a week, with continuing claims at 1.7-million.

The unexpectedly high levels of claims underscore the uneven nature of the labour market’s recovery. Many businesses are hiring or bringing back workers, yet millions remain unemployed and others are on the chopping block as more companies announce job cuts and small-business aid runs dry.

With legislators at a stalemate over additional jobless benefits and US President Donald Trump’s stopgap aid ending, unemployed Americans face even tougher challenges than before. In addition, virus cases are climbing again in some parts of the country.

“It is especially concerning that the pace of layoffs has not slowed more materially even though the economy has reopened more fully, and more and more businesses have come back online,” Rubeela Farooqi, chief US economist at High Frequency Economics, said in a note.

“The risk now comes from another round of virus outbreaks in coming weeks. The labour market remains at risk of permanent damage, which will prolong the path back to pre-pandemic levels.”

Despite the weaker-than-forecast jobless figures, US stocks rose at the open on Thursday, while 10-year treasury yields were higher.

Before seasonal adjustments, initial claims in state programmes rose by about 20,000 to 857,000, led by increases in California and Texas. The rise in California could partially reflect temporary job losses due to wildfires in the state, said Matthew Luzzetti, chief US economist at Deutsche Bank.

“It’s still historically high jobless claims, but I don’t want to overemphasise one single data point given that there is some uncertainty about what’s driving it,” Luzzetti said.

Even so, initial claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, the ... ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 17:21:11 +0200 0 0 Stubbornly high US job losses signal struggle with Covid-19 cases 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 4:44 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922574 https://iono.fm/e/922574
To obtain and keep power the party must craft a policy structure that appeals to the electorate. As Carol Paton cogently noted in the last three paragraphs of her article, the DA has failed, and continues to fail, in this understanding (“DA now a party for some, not all, as new race policy entrenches denialism”, September 8).

The fundamental concepts of 19th century liberalism are a valuable backbone in modern Western political theory, to be built on and modified to accommodate current circumstances. To fixate on one aspect and closely relate it to modern views on race and nonracialism in the face of SA history is politically foolish.

What the DA needs to create is a pragmatic and simple-to-understand range of policies that the majority of South Africans can relate to. Think education: Break the stranglehold of Marxist unions over teaching in government schools so that proper result-oriented education is provided to uplift all our children, particularly those in rural areas. Think labour policy: Do away with the inordinate power of Cosatu, exercised to protect often overpaid jobs and its members from free competition in the labour field.

There are many more underemployed and unemployed people than there are union members, a constituency waiting to be appealed to. The whole of government, national, provincial and local, and the state-owned entities, are stuffed with often incompetent employees, in effect bribed at taxpayers' expense to keep supporting the ANC.

Think what could be achieved with the money saved in an efficient and slim government by using it to build schools, technical colleges and general public works. (Just dream of pothole-free roads and streets, and centrally situated social housing, for a start.)

I suggest that Gwen Ngwenya’s reading of the popular view of black economic empowerment (BEE) is wrong. This ANC policy is not liked because it simply feeds the corruption at the top of the ANC. Redrafted and supported by appropriate legislation, training and funding, as above, BEE could be a powerful tool to extend economic participation in our economy to the many who languish unemployed in the ANC/Cosatu workers’ paradise.

Robert Stone, Linden

JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an e-mail with your comments. Letters of more ... ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 16:51:58 +0200 0 0 LETTER: DA needs pragmatic policies the majority of South Africans can relate to 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 2:28 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922559 https://iono.fm/e/922559
Suu Kyi, a former political prisoner of Myanmar’s then ruling military junta in the 1990s who now rules as state counsellor, was awarded the parliament’s Sakharov Prize in 1990.

As part of that honour she is also invited to gatherings of prize laureates, EU legislators and rights organisations to campaign on rights issues internationally.

EU legislators said in a statement that her suspension from Sakharov Prize events was “a response to her failure to act and her acceptance of the ongoing crimes against the Rohingya community in Myanmar”.

Suu Kyi, who came to power after a landslide election victory in 2015 that ended half a century of army rule, is accused internationally of failing to denounce a military campaign against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.

Her stance on the Rohingyas has seen her stripped of other awards, calls for the Nobel committee to revoke the Nobel Peace Prize that she won in 1991 and criticism from former supporters.

Suu Kyi denies genocide and has defended her country against the charges in the UN court in The Hague.

The EU parliament said she was not stripped of the prize or asked to return the €50,000 prize money because the award was for her pro-democracy role in opposition at the time, when she was repeatedly imprisoned and placed under house arrest until her release in 2010.

Reuters ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 16:31:37 +0200 0 0 EU legislators shun Myanmar’s Suu Kyi 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:35 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922560 https://iono.fm/e/922560
Premier Sihle Zikalala made these statistics available when he released a report on owners and directors of companies awarded Covid-19 contracts on Thursday.

“Our analysis shows that out of this total of R2.1bn‚ R810m (38.4%) was spent on African-owned companies. The total of African-owned companies used was 235 (60%) out of a total of 392 companies‚” he said.

The spend on Indian-owned companies was R622m.

“The analysis further shows that R37m (1.8%) was spent on white-owned companies‚ a total of R31m on companies with owners showing a mixed racial profile‚ while R10m was spent on companies owned by coloured people and R9.7m on companies owned by Asians‚” Zikalala said.

He said suppliers who had more than 50% female ownership accounted for 33% of the spend while about 15% of the total was spent supporting young business owners.

Almost R1.8m went to suppliers whose owners were not registered on the Central Supplier Database‚ therefore no details were available, he said.

There were three companies‚ which received R1.8m‚ that were registered only at the end of March.

“We are unable to provide the same detail for municipalities at this stage because the reporting format and the IT systems applicable are different. It is‚ however‚ work in progress. The Treasury issued new directives and municipalities‚ too‚ will have to report in a format that will enable the extraction of directors or owners’ details‚” said Zikalala.

He said the report was not meant to pass judgment on the process of procurement or any of the companies awarded contracts.

“We are releasing the information merely to account and be transparent to our people. Should we find‚ at a later stage‚ that there was something untoward in the awarding of the contracts‚ we will not hesitate to act.”

Meanwhile‚ the State Security Agency and SA Revenue Service have been approached on the process of conducting lifestyle audits on the province’s executive council and senior officials.

“We have been advised via correspondence about the processes in motion to finalise all relevant details that will guide the process nationally‚” Zikalala said. ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 16:16:09 +0200 0 0 This is how KwaZulu-Natal spent R2.1bn on Covid-19 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 2:30 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922529 https://iono.fm/e/922529
Five European judges in Lausanne failed to set aside the discriminatory regulations that have created a dangerous precedent in sport for international athletes with “differences of sex development” (DSD), such as Semenya. The regulations, which require women athletes to chemically or surgically lower their testosterone levels, has created a moral and ethical dilemma that harms the human dignity of certain members of society. So much so that the World Medical Association (WMA) has called on physicians around the world to take no part in implementing the World Athletics regulations.

I was hopeful that those who have the power to determine whether women such as Semenya can compete freely in the international athletics arena would rescind the Court of Arbitration in Sport (CAS) ruling. Semenya’s appeal was an opportunity for the highest court in Switzerland to align its decisions with the growing international consensus that supports the protection of the human rights and dignity of such athletes, who face humiliation and discrimination for not being “female” enough.

Naturally, Semenya is disappointed, although she says while the door to her career may be closed it is not locked. She is grateful to have realised her double 800m Olympic and World Championship goals. She sees the decision as a loss more for World Athletics than for her. The international 800m field has now become weaker without her presence in defending her title.

As Semenya’s legal team we are considering all options for a legal fightback both internationally and domestically. The SA department of sport & recreation has put out a rallying call to support her and to review this week’s decision. As long as a sporting federation holds the power to force female athletes to undergo medically dangerous and invasive procedures, our work is not yet done.

We are encouraged by the growing tide of support on the issue of discrimination in sport. The ruling is out of step with reputable international organisations that have influence. In April 2019 the WMA stated that the World Athletics rules “constitute a flagrant discrimination based ... ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 16:00:23 +0200 0 0 As long as sports bodies can force dangerous procedures on people, the fight is not over 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 4:12 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922530 https://iono.fm/e/922530
The damaging consequences of his choices are threatening to capsize EU-UK trade talks. Johnson’s solution is to go back on the deal he had negotiated. The impression is that his words are not worth the paper they are written on. If this was allowed there could be no confidence that the UK would stick to its side of the bargain in any trade arrangement. A Britain that reneges on international agreements can hardly lecture rogue states when they do the same.

In Europe, trust in Johnson is evaporating fast. He has sought to manufacture a crisis by suggesting he could rip up agreed texts if he doesn’t get what he wants by mid-October. This appears naive and irresponsible. Johnson’s problem is that while boasting of ending years of “vassalage” by Brussels, he agreed to constrain the UK’s sovereignty in the withdrawal treaty.

According to well-sourced reports, the prime minister claims his government’s efforts to regenerate the economy using state aid could be stymied by EU rules. This is true. Johnson knows this because he signed the UK up to the EU’s state-aid regime — in cases where subsidies “affect trade” in goods between Northern Ireland and the EU — as a quid pro quo to allow the province to maintain frictionless trade with the bloc, and to avoid a border on the island of Ireland. The government plans a new bill to eliminate the legal force of parts of Johnson’s deal, but this will be ineffective in the face of international law. /London, September 7

The Guardian ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 15:45:47 +0200 0 0 THE GUARDIAN: Trust in Johnson waning on move to remodel Brexit 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:59 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922520 https://iono.fm/e/922520
Its message then needs to appeal to and resonate with people’s emotions, experiences, needs and aspirations as individuals or groups in a clear and unambiguous manner. By eliminating the concept of racial groupings from its thinking and essentially removing colour from Desmond Tutu’s rainbow nation, the party — despite its honourable intentions — may well find a less than enthusiastic response from people on the ground who do see themselves as constituting racial groups.

SA needs to strive for harmony between races, and this cannot be achieved by only uplifting the poor, mainly black, communities who fail a means test. It needs to be created by and promoted via a national initiative backed by political, business and societal will and a proactive programme that acknowledges and instills a national understanding of racism, establishes a common purpose to eliminate it, and promotes change in behavioural practices from all races. This will not be possible in a perceived environment of race denialism.

David Gant

Kenilworth

JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an e-mail with your comments. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Send your letter by e-mail to letters@businesslive.co.za (mailto:letters@businesslive.co.za). Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number. ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 15:27:46 +0200 0 0 LETTER: DA takes rainbow out of the rainbow nation 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:27 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922495 https://iono.fm/e/922495
The DA has been calling on Metrorail for a long time to improve security in and around its stations. It is unacceptable that commuters are left stranded because of cable theft and electricity infrastructure being vandalised.

This trend of not having sufficient security is concerning as the railway system is the cheapest mode of transport, which many residents in Gauteng rely on daily to get to and from work. When the service is not available residents have to make alternative arrangements for transport, which they cannot afford.

It is clear that a specialised unit to investigate this trend of our railway stations being vandalised is needed in Gauteng, along with beefed up security at all train stations.

Fred Nel MPL

DA Gauteng shadow MEC for roads & transport

JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an e-mail with your comments. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Send your letter by e-mail to letters@businesslive.co.za (mailto:letters@businesslive.co.za). Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number. ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 15:17:25 +0200 0 0 LETTER: Time to beef up railway security 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:01 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922496 https://iono.fm/e/922496
Unfortunately, this explanation probably needs to be taken with a large pinch of salt. Earlier this year TRESemmé’s parent company, Unilever, a British group that has an annual turnover of about €52bn — was accused of trying to pressurise Cosmopolitan magazine into firing its Sri Lankan editor over her refusal to promote a skin-whitening cream. Unilever did not deny the allegation and instead explained that a member of its team “exercised extremely poor judgment”.

Four years earlier, Israel’s health minister threatened to revoke Unilever’s licence over a consignment of cornflakes that had been contaminated by salmonella. In issuing this threat, the minister stated that Unilever had failed to act responsibly and had lied to the public and to his ministry.

In another incident, a mercury thermometer factory operated by an Indian subsidiary of Unilever in the South Indian town of Kodaikanal was shut down by state regulators after the company was caught dumping toxic mercury waste in a densely populated part of town. After a 15-year battle that included an aggressive social media campaign, Unilever eventually paid an undisclosed amount to 591 of its former employees.

Given Unilever’s track record one cannot easily rule out the possibility that Clicks’ employees gave the green light to the TRESemmé advert out of a fear of reprisals from Unilever/TRESemmé. Further investigation is clearly required.

Terence Grant

Cape Town

JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an e-mail with your comments. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Send your letter by e-mail to letters@businesslive.co.za (mailto:letters@businesslive.co.za). Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number. ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 15:13:47 +0200 0 0 LETTER: Fear of TRESemmé and Unilever may be behind Clicks advert 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:44 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922497 https://iono.fm/e/922497
Where poverty is the real injustice, that should be the metric. The race of the poor person should be of no relevance whatsoever. Paton should rewrite her article with the complete picture in mind. The appeal of both policies, when presented to the electorate as a complete and workable programme that can be implemented by a capable and corruption-free administration, will then be clearly visible to all but those wearing blinkers.

Paton opines that black voters had been attracted to the DA because it had begun to look like a cleaner, more efficient version of the ANC. As a long-serving DA public representative and activist, now retired, I have to ask on what facts this opinion is based. My interactions with the black electorate informed me that it was the differences between the DA and the ANC that won their support. For the DA to be an ANC-lite will get it nowhere.

Like its predecessor parties, the DA fully recognises that the key to building a prosperous nation for all lies in uniting and mobilising all resources, human and material, in a body politic that is not based on racial identity and under sound governance in a capable state. Identity politics, exclusionary by its very nature, proved to be the undoing of the apartheid state. For the same reason, our beloved SA is unravelling again.

John Mendelsohn

Paulshof

JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an e-mail with your comments. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Send your letter by e-mail to letters@businesslive.co.za (mailto:letters@businesslive.co.za). Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number. ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 15:12:14 +0200 0 0 LETTER: The DA’s appeal is in its difference from the ANC 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:50 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922498 https://iono.fm/e/922498
As a retired MD of a medium-sized company, I am well acquainted with the machinations of the ANC’s broad-based BEE policy, which, to my mind has been an utter failure that has enriched the politically connected, privileged few while the plight of the vast majority of the poor has been completely ignored.

To suggest that the DA has built itself a comfortable and tasteful new house shaped by 300 years of colonial rule is ridiculous. While the party is trying to eliminate racial profiling — “[rejecting] race as a social category” — it acknowledges the redress that is necessary due to the injustices of the previous regime. The party just believes there are better ways of addressing this issue.

I agree that, if asked, most of the poor and unemployed will tell you BEE has not assisted them at all. We need to stop policies based on skin colour that perpetuate the polarisation between the different ethnic groups in our country and start looking at each other as fellow South Africans.

Johann Kruger

Noordhoek

JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an e-mail with your comments. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Send your letter by e-mail to letters@businesslive.co.za (mailto:letters@businesslive.co.za). Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime phone number. ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 15:07:36 +0200 0 0 LETTER: BEE has patently failed, so let’s try another route 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:16 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922499 https://iono.fm/e/922499
The first is the banks’ management of loans. Banks provide astronomical amounts of money to fund bad debts — Standard Bank R11.3bn and Absa R14.7bn, according to your article. Put aside the risk and accounting conservancy, and all the other clichés used to justify this, and consider what is actually happening.

Surely risk associated with loans should be individually, and much more diligently, considered before loans are paid to borrowers, taking into account appropriate safeguards, such as collateral and security. Banks even categorise loans into three stages to help assess the adequacy of their impairment provisions. Interesting information, but it is actually too little too late.

What seems to be taken for granted is that banks have effectively evolved a scheme to donate money to errant borrowers with shareholders’ funds, and to replenish it with bank charges at their customers’ expense.

Second, defaulting on debt repayment seems to be quite common by individuals who enjoy good lifestyles at the expense of others. The SA Revenue Service, service providers and banks are prime examples of their victims.

One cannot but wonder whether many so-called borrowers accept loans from banks with no intention of repaying them at all.

To some degree, banks must accept responsibility for this, as they continually aggressively advance money and subsequently write it off to keep their scheme revolving.

Ian Juszkiewicz

Morningside

The FM welcomes concise letters from readers. They can be sent to fmmail@fm.co.za (mailto:fmmail@fm.co.za) ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 15:06:48 +0200 0 0 LETTER: Banks must take some responsibility 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:49 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922501 https://iono.fm/e/922501
Cricket is, as Van der Bijl suggested, a way of life. Stephen Fry tells us cricket is God’s way of telling us he loves us. As a lifelong five-day version spectator, I fully believe that in the ageing process time spent watching cricket doesn’t count.

Let’s create from the chaos something honourable and good, and let’s ask those for whom cricket is not an almost holy pursuit to simply step down, with the sort of dignity our game stands for.

Michael Hook, Parkhurst

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It’s ironic that the chief architect of this implosion is former party president Jacob Zuma. He’ll do everything, even destroy a party built with blood and tears over 108 years, to save his skin. His recent letter to President Cyril Ramaphosa is yet another attempt at a power grab to continue the project to destroy the state.

I am not sorry for Ramaphosa either. He was part of the Zuma brigade that hounded a sitting president out of the Union Buildings in 2008. All because Thabo Mbeki didn’t want to interfere with the prosecution to save Zuma from corruption charges.

The very same Ramaphosa stood against Kgalema Motlanthe for party deputy president in Mangaung in 2012. That was an opportunity for the ANC to cleanse itself of the corrupt Zuma, but Ramaphosa legitimised Zuma’s corrupt, infested slate because he wanted power. Let him fall.

The same applies to Gwede Mantashe, Pravin Gordhan, Blade Nzimande, Zwelinzima Vavi, Motlante himself, Lindiwe Sisulu and the like. They were part of Zuma’s tsunami.

They cannot claim that they didn’t know Zuma was corrupt when they imposed him on the ANC in Polokwane in 2007, and later on the country as president.

I will not shed a tear when Ramaphosa and his ilk are at the mercy of the same hyenas they once stood alongside while state institutions such as the Scorpions were dismantled. There is, indeed, no honour among ANC thieves.

Magilogilo Cele

Midrand

The FM welcomes concise letters from readers. They can be sent to fmmail@fm.co.za (mailto:fmmail@fm.co.za) ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 14:54:10 +0200 0 0 LETTER: No honour among ANC thieves 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:44 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922478 https://iono.fm/e/922478
Those who complain about the EFF’s response to Clicks as “irresponsible and violent” are perhaps not aware that Clicks was being irresponsible and violent against black people. But why are we surprised? Isn’t it the capitalists that always call on workers to tighten their belts or observe the capitalist laws in fighting capitalism?

It is against this sterile approach to the struggle that Biko warned us that they kick us and still seek to teach us how to respond to the kick. It is “irresponsible and violent” to expect black people to click like when Clicks unleashes violence on our kinky hair.

I'd understand if it was the governing party that dubbed the response against Clicks as “irresponsible and violent”, because its default position is to defend capital for fear of capital flight, or disinvestment in some rare instances.

Anda Mbikwana

Johannesburg

JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an e-mail with your comments. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Send your letter by e-mail to letters@businesslive.co.za (mailto:letters@businesslive.co.za). Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number. ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 14:53:28 +0200 0 0 LETTER: Clicks was violent first 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:12 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922479 https://iono.fm/e/922479
But its final recommendations in a report to parliament did not back nuclear power, efforts to capture and store climate-changing carbon emissions, or limits on driving and flying.

The assembly said future changes should follow principles of fairness — particularly for those less able to adapt — as well as freedom of choice, and strong, consistent government leadership on climate action with cross-party support.

“They didn’t want policies to change with every successive government,” noted Chris Shaw, parliamentary director for the Climate Assembly UK, a 108-member panel created to provide citizen input on meeting Britain's climate change goals.

Alok Sharma, Britain’s business minister and president of the now-delayed COP26 UN climate change summit in Glasgow, said parliament would look at the findings over the next two months and “see what more we can do”.

Assembly members urged the government to rapidly adopt its recommendations and “be bold” in dealing with climate risks.

“People are willing to change if educated properly and given the facts,” noted Marc Robson, a panel member and smart-meter fitter for British Gas who is now retraining to install electric vehicle charging points.

The assembly, selected to reflect diversity in Britain's demographics and views on climate change, met over a series of weekends from January to May — with the Covid-19 crisis pushing some sessions online — to learn about options to cut emissions.

Their recommendations, including on how to handle the pandemic recovery, aim to help parliament understand which shifts most voters back, and which ideas may need a rethink.

“This report is a striking tribute to the common sense of the British public,” said Tom Burke, chair of independent climate change think-tank E3G.

Panel members said, for instance, that they supported efforts to cut meat and dairy consumption by 20%-40% — but the dietary changes needed to be voluntary and achieved through education and government promotion.

They backed energy-efficiency upgrades for homes and new heating technologies, but asked that each house be retrofitted “in one go” to cut disruption for occupants.

Homeowners, depending on where they live and other factors, should be able to choose among different technologies, from heat pumps ... ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 14:49:15 +0200 0 0 This is how the UK plans to cut emissions to zero by 2050 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 5:25 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922480 https://iono.fm/e/922480
Maruping was caught in the spotlight during an examination of the running of the largest SA business support scheme in living memory: the Temporary Employer/Employee Relief Scheme (Ters). The commissioner was in the (very) hot seat when the auditor-general issued his report into Covid-19 spending, just as the ANC was promising its latest corruption crackdown.

Yet, while there is a growing list of people in public life who may have committed fraud — or worse — during the pain of the pandemic, I find it hard to spot any obvious trace of criminality in the commissioner’s conduct. Over just a few months of the pandemic Ters will have distributed more than R40bn to keep on the payroll of companies that were in lockdown and unable to trade millions of workers who were therefore unable to work.

When the pandemic struck in March SA had a manual UIF system where each employee who wanted to claim benefits would have to fill in forms and stand in a queue. Typically, new IT systems are designed over months, and tested and retested with parallel test processing before going live. The UIF had no time to do any of that.

The choice was simple. Launch with a flawed system and fix it on the go, or build a perfect system and only then launch it. Yet the latter was not an option, pressure to launch the system and to get the payments flowing in April and May was enormous.

Another concern is that the UIF calculation methodology that was used was insanely complex for such a task. Why did we not just use a simple percentage of salary with a cap? The UIF methodology is just too complex for ordinary people to understand, be they the government, employers or employees.

I believe an incorrect decision was made upfront, with which the commissioner and his team had to live. The Ters rules were also changed in April and May, which introduced renewed uncertainty over who qualified. Should the rules not have been clear from the start?

Employment & labour minister Thulas Nxesi gave the UIF the task of disbursing the money, and then the UIF had to ... ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 14:45:42 +0200 0 0 UIF commissioner bears the brunt for keeping Ters ship afloat 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 5:45 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922469 https://iono.fm/e/922469
I received three complaints during the course of 2019 from three businesses undergoing wage negotiations. Each said it had received demands from ostensible branches of the EFF stating there would be trouble if the wage demands were not conceded within 48 hours.

On following up on these demands I did in fact get through to individuals who said they were acting on behalf of the EFF, and were approached by the respective trade unions to help them convince the company to accede to the wage increase.

Such gangster-like tactics are going to take root in our society unless the police step in to put an end to it. But it is evident from the Clicks debacle that our police force is unable or unwilling to stop these illegal activities.

Michael Bagraim, DA deputy shadow employment & labour minister

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That has changed in spectacular fashion.

Few trade negotiators have found themselves in the position of the EU’s Michel Barnier, who arrived in London this week intending to break an impasse over issues such as state aid only to find Boris Johnson’s government doubling down on a bid to openly breach international law by rewriting the terms of Brexit itself. Legislation published on Wednesday would allow Britain to ditch measures such as customs paperwork, designed to avoid a return to a hard border in Ireland.

Hence exasperated EU officials, who’ve long refrained from calling Johnson’s bluff over myriad threats to walk away and make a messy “no-deal” scenario reality, are now sending their own signal that talks are nearing collapse. The EU has begun studying the possibility of legal action against the UK over the proposed legislation, as reported by Alberto Nardelli of Bloomberg News, with obvious grounds to retaliate if the bill becomes law. That is tantamount to closing the door on trade negotiations.

Sketching out a lawsuit may not sound particularly aggressive in a world where Donald Trump breezily threatens to tear up everything from free trade agreements to Nato. But in the staid world of Brussels diplomacy, this is a clear message. If Johnson makes good on his bid to breach international law, Barnier may as well climb back on to the Eurostar.

The multi-step legal process to launching a complaint via the European court of justice would likely run well beyond the December deadline for reaching a trade deal. And while Brussels technocrats have always tried to insulate talks from the sabre-rattling of politicians, there would very likely be no trust left to agree on the fine print, and no real ability for Barnier to convince the EU’s 27 members and its European parliament to sign it into a binding treaty.

Such a move will no doubt ... ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 13:36:02 +0200 0 0 Boris Johnson’s sabre rattling may just strengthen the EU 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 3:57 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922426 https://iono.fm/e/922426
Sotheby’s said on Thursday that the 102.39-carat diamond, a flawless white sparkler, was the second-largest oval diamond of its kind to be offered at auction. The largest, a 118.28-carat diamond, set a record $30.8m price when it was sold in 2013.

Only seven such diamonds, known in the trade as D colour flawless, or internally flawless white diamonds, of more than 100 carats have previously been sold at auction.

“More and more people have come to understand that something billions of years old and of the size of a lollipop can store as much value as a Rembrandt self-portrait or a Basquiat,” Gary Schuler, worldwide chair of jewellery at Sotheby’s, said in a statement.

The diamond will be sold in a single-lot auction without a reserve price at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong on October 5.

“Diamonds of this calibre and size have sold anywhere between $11.9m to $33.7m,” said Quig Bruning, head of Sotheby’s New York jewellery department.

Sotheby’s said the gem was cut from a 271-carat rough that De Beers recovered at its Victor mine in Canadaat the Victor Mine in the Canadian province of Ontario in 2018 and cut and polished for more than a year.

Two of the most famous large diamonds — the Koh-i-Noor and The Cullinan 1 — belong to the British monarchy and form part of the British Crown Jewels.

The world record for any diamond or jewel sold at auction was set in 2017 when a 59.60-carat fancy vivid pink diamond was sold for $71.2m to the Hong Kong jewellery company Chow Tai Fook, Sotheby’s said.

Reuters ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 13:23:19 +0200 0 0 Flawless white sparkler diamond could sell for $30m 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:52 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922409 https://iono.fm/e/922409
There is, however, another element that is required to actualise the ANC national executive committee resolution that requires the cabinet to urgently establish a permanent, independent entity to see off the corrupt: skill in the revision of the legal framework for countering the corrupt needs to be brought to bear to make that resolution the lived reality in the criminal justice administration.

It is common cause that neither the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) nor the Hawks has the necessary capacity, resourcing, personnel and experience to mount complex corruption prosecutions in the numbers needed. Nor is there any prospect of either the NPA or the Hawks being able to attract the right personnel in time to save SA from failure as a state. It takes up to 20 years to train a prosecutor in the intricacies of defeating defences put up by wily senior counsel retained by the corrupt who are brought to trial.

Skilled law-making that properly takes on board the criteria set by the Constitutional Court in the Glenister litigation, is the safest, surest and best-practice way in which to address the lack of strength in criminal justice administration with regard to countering the corrupt. If the determination claimed is applied skilfully to fulfilling the wishes of the NEC (which happily coincide with those of the courts), it will be possible to establish a body capable of seeing off the corrupt effectively and efficiently.

Strong institutions of government are required by UN sustainable development goal number 16: neither the Hawks nor the NPA have any prospect of being strong enough to deal with grand corruption any time soon enough; a new Chapter Nine institution with a mandate to investigate and prosecute corruption is required.

With determination and skill, it can be established. The Hawks have other priority crimes to attend to and the NPA will be better able to deal with gender-based violence and common law crimes without the burden of countering grand corruption.

Paul Hoffman SC, Accountability Now

JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an e-mail with your comments. Letters of more than 300 words will be ... ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 13:12:47 +0200 0 0 LETTER: Skilled law-making is surest way to stop weakness in criminal justice administration 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 2:18 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922428 https://iono.fm/e/922428
This spate of wild weather is consistent with climate change, scientists say, and the world can expect even more extreme weather and higher risks from natural disasters as global emissions of greenhouse gases continue.

“We are seeing the emergence of some signals that would have had almost no chance of happening without human-induced climate change,” said Sonia Seneviratne, a climate scientist at Swiss university ETH Zürich.

For decades, scientists have warned of such events — but have been wary of saying that a particular storm or heatwave was a direct result of climate change. That’s now changing.

Advances in a relatively new field known as “event attribution science” have enabled researchers to assess how big a role climate change might have played in a specific case.

In determining that link, scientists assess simulations of how weather systems might behave if humans had never started pumping carbon dioxide into the air, and compare that with what is happening today. They also factor in weather observations made over the past century or more.

“What seemed like an established truth that you cannot attribute a particular extreme weather event to climate change is less and less true,” Seneviratne said.

Feeling the heat

The clearest examples are found in the growing frequency and intensity of heatwaves worldwide.

Scientists needed only days to identify climate change as the key culprit in this year’s record temperatures in Siberia, with extreme heat drying out forests and peat across the Russian tundra, leading to huge wildfires.

Climate change links have also been found in the simultaneous summer heatwaves that hit Europe, Japan and North America in 2018. Studies found that the chances of these events happening together would have been near zero without the industrial-era rise in planet-warming carbon emissions.

“When it comes to heatwaves, we see that climate change is an absolute game-changer,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford who has helped pioneer the field of attribution science.

As a heatwave hit the US West Coast last month, Earth saw a new record high temperature of 54.4oC in Death Valley, which sits below sea level in ... ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 13:04:04 +0200 0 0 Scientists blame human-induced climate change for 2020’s wild weather 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 6:07 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922396 https://iono.fm/e/922396
The ECB’s upcoming meeting, along with emergency Brexit talks in London after negotiations turned chaotic again, and wilting commodity markets kept the bulls firmly on the leash.

An early push from the pan-European Stoxx 600 quickly faltered as tech struggled, the euro and government bonds gained ahead of the ECB meeting, and drooping oil and metals prices hit the region’s drillers and miners.

Analysts were waiting to see whether reports that the ECB will fractionally revise up its coronavirus-battered economic and inflation forecasts later would ultimately affect the chances of a further ramping up of stimulus, which would rein in the euro.

“What happens at the ECB today is quite important for global markets,” said TD Securities’ European head of currency strategy Ned Rumpeltin. “There is still one trade, which is reflate or die,” he said, referring to stimulus aid lifting asset prices. “So the degree to which the ECB either takes that one step forward or one step back today will be important.”

Overnight, MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares excluding Japan had snapped its longest losing streak since February with a 0.7% gain. Japan’s Nikkei rose 0.9% and Chinese blue chips rose 0.8%.

Markets in Sydney and Hong Kong were just better than flat though and, in a reminder of the risks, Jakarta nosedived 5% on plans to re-introduce Covid-19 social restrictions in the Indonesian capital.

Like Europe though, Wall Street futures traded down between 0.5% and 0.7% ahead of trading there.

Mizuho Bank’s head of economics and strategy in Singapore, Vishnu Varathan, said investors were grappling with whether this month’s steep US tech sell-off was really done, and beyond that an increasingly uncertain US political outlook and persistent China-US tensions.

Concerns about demand for fuel also had oil prices back under pressure, in an indication of wavering confidence in global growth. Brent crude futures fell back to $40.45 a barrel after bouncing back from a three-month low overnight. US crude WTI futures slipped 0.8% to $37.68 a barrel.

Bond buyers also returned after a tepid response to a $35bn US 10-year auction overnight, pushing the yield on US 10-year debt down by a whisker to 0.6968%.

Euro waits for ECB

Most ... ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 12:47:21 +0200 0 0 Global shares stall as tech stocks rebound, with all eyes on the ECB policy meeting 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 4:16 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922377 https://iono.fm/e/922377
The centre-right Liberal party and the rural-focused Nationals have a decades-old partnership in both state and federal politics, which sees power shared across cabinet positions when in government.

NSW deputy premier John Barilaro, from the Nationals, said his party would no longer support government legislation unless changes were made to policy drafted to protect koala habitats.

Barilaro said new policy unfairly limits the way rural property owners can manage their land but he maintains his party supported conservation. “We actually want to see the population double. We are not anti-koala,” Barilaro said.

The Nationals will abstain from voting on government legislation, except when it affects regional areas, forcing the government to find support elsewhere for its policies.

The party will also introduce a bill next week to repeal the conservation law.

The Nationals hold 13 seats in the lower house while the Liberals hold 35, giving the coalition a majority in the 93-member house.

NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian, the leader of the coalition and the state Liberal party, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

An inquiry in June found koalas in NSW could become extinct by 2050 unless the government immediately intervened. Land clearing for agriculture, urban development, mining and forestry had been the biggest factor in the loss of habitat.

Koalas live in eucalyptus forests, located mainly in the country’s east.

New policy restricts construction in habitats and landowners must seek exemptions to conduct various works.

Corey Bradshaw, professor of global ecology at Flinders University, said NSW has some of the weakest anti-clearing laws in Australia.

Bradshaw said in an e-mailed statement, “Koalas live in and eat trees — you don’t need a university degree to predict what will happen when you continue to destroy their already highly degraded habitats.”

Reuters ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 12:00:18 +0200 0 0 Koalas cause political chaos Down Under 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 2:13 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922353 https://iono.fm/e/922353
US West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures dipped 61c to $37.44 a barrel at 8.08am GMT, after climbing 3.5% on Wednesday. Brent crude futures fell 53c to $40.26 a barrel, after rising 2.5% the previous day.

The EIA will release official weekly inventory data later on Thursday, a day later than normal following this week’s US Labour Day holiday.

The EIA already cut its 2020 world oil demand growth forecast by 210,000 barrels per day to 8.32-million bpd.

Industry data from the American Petroleum Institute (API) showed on Wednesday that the country’s crude stockpiles unexpectedly rose by 3-million barrels in the week to September 4 with coronavirus cases rising in several US states.

“If the EIA confirms a crude oil build later today, it would be the first US stock build since mid-July,” ING analysts said.

On China’s oil imports, which have supported oil in recent months, Bank ANZ said they were likely to level off as “teapot” or independent refineries, reach their maximum annual crude import quotas.

In a further bearish sign, leading commodity traders are booking tankers to store crude oil and diesel on the water, with supply outpacing consumption, according to trading sources and shipping data.

The rising stockpiles come ahead of a meeting on September 17 of the market monitoring panel of oil cartel Opec and allies, including Russia (Opec+), which, in August, trimmed supply curbs from earlier this year on expectations demand would improve.

“Despite the recent slide in oil prices, we think that the Opec+ leadership will continue to direct its efforts towards securing better compliance rather than pushing for deeper cuts at this stage,” RBC analysts said.

Reuters ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 11:46:44 +0200 0 0 Oil prices dip as US crude stockpiles rise 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 2:14 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922330 https://iono.fm/e/922330
The deals’ terms require the government to pay for electricity generated even if there’s no demand for it. The move helped Ghana end its power crisis by 2016, boosting its generation to about 4,600MW, well above national peak demand of 2,700MW.

Debt owed to the power companies has grown, rising to $1.4bn at the end of June, more than doubling from $600m in July last year, according to the Chamber of Independent Power Producers, Distributors and Bulk Consumers. Its members may be forced to shut their operations, it said last month.

“Debt levels could rise even further,” Samantha Singh, a Johannesburg-based Africa strategist at Absa Bank, said in an e-mail. “The potential increase in these liabilities could hurt government finances even further in a time when they are already strained due to Covid-19.”

When President Nana Akufo-Addo came to power in 2017, he started the sale of energy bonds on the back of fuel levies to clear the outstanding liabilities. This helped cut the debt by half by early 2018, though more bonds haven’t been sold because there isn’t enough revenue to support them.

State-owned Electricity Company of Ghana has suffered an estimated annual revenue loss of $580m due mainly to transmission leaks, illegal connections and unpaid bills. Plans to tackle the problem by introducing private investors under a US-funded aid programme failed to win approval. The company’s MD, Kwame Agyeman-Budu, did not respond to multiple calls and a text seeking comment.

Not much help is coming from the West African Power Pool project, under which member countries could sell their excess power to neighbours. While Ghana was a net exporter of 967MW of electricity to other countries in 2019, further exchange is hindered until 2023, when current interconnection projects will be completed.

The coronavirus pandemic pushed Ghana further into financial straits. It responded with more than 3-billion cedis ($519m) in unplanned spending that included providing free electricity and water to citizens, tax waivers and credit to small businesses, a situation that made it difficult to keep up with the debt repayments, according to finance minister Ken Ofori-Atta.

“When you have limited resources in a Covid-19 environment you have to be specific about what you’re paying and how much you pay,” Ofori-Atta said in a phone interview. “We’ve tried ... ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 11:30:44 +0200 0 0 Easy electricity deal backfires as Ghana now owed $1.4bn 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 3:33 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922301 https://iono.fm/e/922301
Inhabitants of this water-scarce region southeast of Nairobi have often faced hunger during long dry periods, while heavy rains inundate its low-lying savannah with little notice.

Sometimes the two extremes hit the county at the same time.

“We had to think of a quick, locally led solution for our people,” said Mary Mbenge, Makueni’s chief officer for natural resources, environment and climate change.

That led to the establishment of the Makueni County Climate Change Fund in 2015, with Makueni among the first five Kenyan counties to pass the legislation needed to create such a fund.

Those five are now up and running, and the model is being scaled up to seven other agricultural counties, including Kisumu, Nandi, Kisii, Kakamega and Narok.

Some, including Makueni, are seeking to work with national and international agencies to tap into global sources of climate finance, such as the Green Climate Fund, to expand local projects.

Mbenge stressed that donors would only be interested “if you have already shown some initiative in utilising climate change money to implement some investments on the ground”.

About 1% of Makueni County’s development budget is earmarked for measures to tackle the effects of a warming climate. That spending is channelled through the local climate fund, averaging about 60-million Kenyan shillings ($554,000) a year.

The fund has a strong focus on community-run projects to improve water supplies for arable and livestock farmers, boosting their incomes and making them more resilient to an increasingly harsh climate.

Some, for example, are breeding fish in earth dams built to capture and store rainfall in the barren landscape.

Sowing seeds

Other activities include providing climate information and advice on how to plant suitable crops and fruit trees, as well as giving warning of anticipated flooding.

More than 95% of farmers working with the fund have planted trees such as mango, orange and avocado, which encouraged a fruit-juice factory to move into the area.

“Our young people are making good use of this water by way of starting tree seedling projects, which earn some cash for them,” said Robert Ndetu, youth co-ordinator for the climate fund’s planning committee.

Decisions about which projects to ... ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 10:52:30 +0200 0 0 Kenya targets climate change with grassroot funds 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 5:55 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922302 https://iono.fm/e/922302
Families slept on roadsides and in supermarket parking lots and fields across the island, which was at the forefront of the European migrant crisis in 2015-2016.

There had been about 12,500 people in the camp. Tuesday night's inferno at Moria sent thousands fleeing, reducing a camp notorious for its poor living conditions to a mass of smouldering steel and melted tent tarpaulin.

A second fire broke out on Wednesday night, destroying whatever was left. Police reinforcements were brought in to prevent migrants from reaching the island's main town of Mytilene, confining them to fields and roadsides.

Eight-year-old Congolese girl Valencia, who was barefoot, gestured to a Reuters reporter that she was hungry and asked for a biscuit. “Our home burnt, my shoes burnt, we don't have food, no water.”

Both she and her mother Natzy Malala, who has a newborn infant, slept on the side of the road.

“There is no food, no milk for the baby,” Natzy Malala said.

The migration ministry said it would take “all necessary steps” to ensure that vulnerable groups and families had shelter, but these were expected to be met with stiff resistance from locals.

Authorities were already at loggerheads with locals over plans to replace Moria with a closed reception centre, which Lesbos residents fear would mean thousands of asylum seekers remaining their permanently.

Municipalities were at odds over the handling of the situation, said Costas Moutzouris, governor of the Northern Aegean. “There is no decision. It's up in the air,” he told Reuters.

A government official who declined to be named said that sheltering migrants on boats was not a safe solution and was sending the wrong message to migrants who would want to leave Lesbos.

Authorities are investigating whether Tuesday night's fires were started deliberately after Covid-19 tests led to the isolation of 35 refugees.

Reuters ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 10:42:35 +0200 0 0 Over 12,000 Lesbos migrants sleep on streets after huge fire destroys camp 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 2:07 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922303 https://iono.fm/e/922303
Apartheid was not a market phenomenon but a statist intervention to thwart the market relationships that would have brought people together in co-operative endeavours. The same is true of the current form of apartheid that is called, euphemistically, BEE and denoted by an evolving chain of Bs and Es. Corruption of language and thought is both a side effect of socialism and a deliberate technique employed by its vanguard or promoters.

The notion that “the people shall share in the country’s wealth” could imply that people are free to produce goods and services and trade some of their product for the different products offered by their fellows. The better the productive service to one another, the greater the mutual benefits each person can enjoy. Production and exchange in a culture of mutual respect for each fellow’s property, with the right to trade that property, is the true source of wealth. But the socialist portrayal of such wealth is that of a generic mass divorced from the ideas and efforts of the individuals who produced it yet owed equally to those who did not. And as we see each day, those with political power are more equal than others.

The power to tax, the power to regulate, and the power to spend public funds each entails the power to redistribute wealth by influencing incentives, prices and the flow of resources. The holders of such power have something to sell, and it should be no surprise that politics tends to attract those who are willing to sell it.

This is not the only reason socialism and other statist interventions bring corruption: the inevitable failures of any socialist project and the human suffering that comes with it can be sustained only through official lies and increasingly overt oppression. As Friedrich Hayek observed on “why the worst get on top”, only the worst among us would have the ruthlessness and callousness to inflict the injustices and oppression required to maintain a socialist system through which they enrich themselves at the expense of all those outside the ruling class.

None of this is mitigated when implemented by leaders with good intentions. As the SABC recently reported, “government has given the assurance that it has put in place mechanisms ... ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 10:38:51 +0200 0 0 RICHARD J GRANT: Perils of rising state power and dwindling personal rights 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 8:16 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922283 https://iono.fm/e/922283
La Cette’s owner Xavier Bousquet is concerned tables will stay empty as the coronavirus flares up across Europe — including new highs in France. The outbreak is bringing with it an unpredictable hodge podge of restrictions that might be almost as debilitating as earlier lockdowns.

“It’s an economic catastrophe,” said Bousquet. “There’s going to be a domino effect among bars and restaurants. I know plenty that are going to close.”

Europe’s sputtering recovery could falter if another hit comes. People remain nervous about shopping for non-essentials as cases rise and tens of thousands of job cuts cause anxiety about the future. Governments are resisting nationwide restrictions on movement while they navigate this delicate phase, opting instead for piecemeal measures.

There’s mandatory face masks in Paris, shut nightclubs in Italy and Germany’s expanded list of travel advisories to include Paris, Brussels and Madrid. In England, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has banned all social gatherings of more than six people from next week.

Despite thousands of more cases after a summer of lax adherence to social-distancing and hygiene rules, death and hospitalisation rates are rising more slowly. That’s easing pressure on governments to take harsh action for now, but virus experts warn against a false sense of security.

Due to spreading among holidaymakers and young partygoers, the average age of those infected in Germany has plummeted from 51 during the spring peak to 33 last week, according to the Robert Koch Institute. Similar trends are evident elsewhere in Europe.

But if the virus emerges again in older populations, that will change, the nation’s public health authority said in a report on Wednesday. French health minister Olivier Veran echoed the sentiment, saying: “The virus hasn’t magically mutated to be less nasty.”

Still, officials insist they can handle the disease for the time being. Italy, the original epicentre of the crisis in Europe, has kept a lid on infections. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said the country won’t need to revive its stringent lockdown. “At worst, we’ll have to intervene in a targeted way,” he said at the weekend.

While Chancellor Angela Merkel recently warned that the pandemic will get worse before it gets better, officials in Germany are optimistic ... ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 10:22:25 +0200 0 0 Europe tackles fresh Covid-19 surge with targeted strategies 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 5:22 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922258 https://iono.fm/e/922258
This means the four generation units in service are not able to take in the requisite amount of coal to generate electricity.

“While Eskom teams are working round the clock to repair the conveyor belt, which is expected to take the better part of the day, any further breakdown elsewhere in the generation fleet, would necessitate the implementation of stage 2 load-shedding at short notice,” the statement said.

gernetzkyk@businesslive.co.za (mailto://gernetzkyk@businesslive.co.za) ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 09:54:05 +0200 0 0 Risk of load-shedding after Medupi equipment failure 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 0:34 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922228 https://iono.fm/e/922228
The hacking attempts targeted staff at Washington-based SKDKnickerbocker, a campaign strategy and communications firm working with Biden and other prominent Democrats, over the past two months, the sources said.

A person familiar with SKDK’s response to the attempts said the hackers failed to gain access to the firm’s networks. “They are well-defended, so there has been no breach,” the person said.

SKDK vice-chair Hilary Rosen declined to comment. A Biden spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

The hacking attempts on SKDK come as US intelligence agencies have raised alarms about possible efforts by foreign governments to interfere in the November presidential election.

Investigations by former special counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate intelligence committee both concluded that affiliates of the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election, and Mueller has warned that Russia was meddling in the current campaign. One of the sources said it was not clear whether Biden’s campaign was the target or whether the Russians were attempting to gain access to information about other SKDK clients.

SKDK MD Anita Dunn was a White House communications director during the Barack Obama presidency and serves the Biden campaign as a senior adviser.

The attempts to infiltrate SKDK were recently flagged to the campaign firm by Microsoft, which identified hackers tied to the Russian government as the likely culprits, according to the three sources briefed on the matter.

The attacks included phishing, a hacking method that seeks to trick users into disclosing passwords, as well as other efforts to infiltrate SKDK’s network, the three sources said.

A Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment.

SKDK is closely associated with the Democratic Party, having worked on six presidential campaigns and numerous congressional races. In addition to its current work for Biden, the firm in 2018 worked on successful governors’ races in Kansas and Connecticut.

Reuters ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 09:05:23 +0200 0 0 Biden campaign firm targeted by suspected Russian hackers, say sources 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 2:16 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922198 https://iono.fm/e/922198
US West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures fell 24 US cents, or 0.63%, to $37.81 a barrel at 4.17am GMT, after climbing 3.5% on Wednesday.

Brent crude futures dropped 17c, or 0.42% to $40.62 a barrel, after rising 2.5% on Wednesday.

The oil market is under pressure on the prospect of subdued demand and rising supply, ANZ analysts said in a note. The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) will release official weekly inventory data later on Thursday, a day later than normal following this week’s US Labour Day holiday.

"[Refinery] maintenance season and a cautious approach from refiners should keep crude oil demand soft,” the bank said, referring to regular scheduled outages at oil processing complexes.

ANZ also said China’s imports are likely to level off as “teapot”, or independent refineries, reach their maximum annual crude import quotas.

With coronavirus cases rising in several US states, the country’s crude stockpiles increased by 3-million barrels in the week to September 4, data from the American Petroleum Institute showed on Wednesday. That compared with analysts’ forecasts of a draw of 1.4-million barrels.

“If the EIA confirms a crude oil build later today, it would be the first US stock build since mid-July,” ING analysts said.

The EIA already cut its 2020 world oil demand growth forecast by 210,000 barrels per day (bpd) to 8.32-million bpd.

In a further bearish sign, leading commodity traders are booking tankers to store crude oil and diesel on the water, with supply outpacing consumption, according to trading sources and shipping data.

The rising stockpiles come ahead of a meeting on September 17 of the market monitoring panel of Opec and allies including Russia, together known as Opec+, which in August trimmed supply curbs from earlier this year on expectations demand would improve.

“This issue will be front and centre ... next week, where we expect a strong statement that if markets continue to weaken, the producer group will be prepared to trim output further,” Citi analysts said in a note.

Reuters ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 08:50:09 +0200 0 0 Oil falls on rising US stockpiles and worries about sluggish demand 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 2:37 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922168 https://iono.fm/e/922168
Spot gold was flat at $1,945.87/oz by 3.07am GMT, after hitting its highest level since September 3 at $1,950.51 on Wednesday. US gold futures were steady at $1,955.50.

“The US dollar is a bit lower, stocks bounced a bit and that essentially carried over to gold as well,” said DailyFx currency strategist Ilya Spivak.

Asian stock markets on Thursday snapped their longest losing streak since February after a bounce on Wall Street, while the dollar index slipped from four-week highs, making gold less expensive for holders of other currencies.

“The ECB meeting is an important piece of event risk ... At some extent gold may be waiting for not even just the ECB, but also for the US CPI [consumer price index] data and the Federal Reserve next week,” Spivak said.

The ECB is all but certain to keep policy unchanged when it announces its decision at 11.45am GMT, which will then be followed by a news conference by its president, Christine Lagarde. The US central bank will follow closely with a two-day meeting set for next week. Major central banks have rolled out unprecedented stimulus measures and kept interest rates low, driving gold to new highs because of its role as a hedge against inflation and currency debasement.

“Ample money supply, lower interest rates and macro uncertainty should support gold investment,” ANZ analysts said in a note. “Physical demand is recovering, so we see the gold price reaching $2,300/oz next year.”

Elsewhere, silver was steady at $27.02/oz, platinum rose 0.4% to $919.24 and palladium gained 1% at $2,295.85.

Reuters ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 08:28:25 +0200 0 0 Weaker dollar lifts gold to one-week high 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 2:14 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922139 https://iono.fm/e/922139
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan gained half a percent, lifting away from a one-month low made on Wednesday.

Japan’s Nikkei rose 0.5% and markets in Shanghai and Hong Kong opened higher. But pressure returned to the oil price on worries about soft demand, a harbinger of weaker global growth.

An overnight rally in riskier currencies also paused, as foreign exchange traders look for the European Central Bank’s (ECB’s) tone at its meeting later on Thursday to guide the next move for the euro, dollar and the broader market.

S&P 500 futures and Nasdaq 100 futures each fell 0.4% in Asia.

Indonesia’s main stock index dropped 4% to its lowest in more than a month on news the country’s capital Jakarta will reinstate social distancing restrictions due to a rise in coronavirus infections.

“The price action suggests that strong buying interest remains on market corrections given the backdrop of ample central bank liquidity,” economists Liz Kendall and Brian Martin at ANZ Bank said in a note.

“However, with some volatility having returned to markets, it’s too soon to say whether the rout is over, or whether last night’s recovery is simply a pause,” the added.

Overnight on Wall Street the tech-heavy Nasdaq posted its steepest rise in more than four months, gaining 2.7%, to halt a three-session sell-down that whacked tech stocks.

Stay-at-home companies such as Facebook and Google-parent Alphabet climbed, while electric-car maker Tesla rebounded nearly 11%, a day after suffering its biggest percentage drop.

The Dow rose 1.6% and the S&P 500 2% and bonds sold off in concert with the rally. The yield on benchmark 10-year US government debt rose about two basis points to 0.71% overnight, with soft demand at a $35bn auction.

That retraced a little bit to sit at 0.6951% in Asia.

Market dislocation

The rebound in equities has steadied a sharp sell-off that has highlighted the fragility of a rally that has carried the Nasdaq up 70% from March lows.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” said Oriano Lizza, sales trader at CMC Markets in Singapore, “as retail investors who had great success on the way up are now facing a tougher environment.

“This ... ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 07:43:20 +0200 0 0 Wall Street bounce lifts Asian markets 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 4:01 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922132 https://iono.fm/e/922132
US markets recovered somewhat on Wednesday from a recent tech-led sell-off, while the rand has also mostly recovered from its fall after the release of Tuesday’s GDP figures.

The rand staged a decent recovery to the R16.60/$ level on Wednesday, tracking a stronger euro, as the focus shifts to the ECB meeting on Thursday, said Peregrine Treasury Solutions executive director Bianca Botes in a note.

In morning trade the Shanghai Composite was up 0.29% and Japan’s Nikkei 0.59%.

Tencent, which often gives direction to Naspers, its largest single shareholder, was up 2.28%.

The rand was 0.18% weaker at R16.64/$.

Gold was flat at $1,945.52/oz, while platinum had fallen 0.2% to $918.69. Brent crude was 0.12% weaker at $42.50 a barrel.

Later on Thursday, insurer Sanlam is expected to report pressure from bad-debt provisions and writedowns in its six months to end-June.

FirstRand is expected to report profits declined more than a third in its year to end-June, as it grapples with higher credit-impairment provisions.

gernetzkyk@businesslive.co.za (mailto://gernetzkyk@businesslive.co.za) ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 07:20:54 +0200 0 0 JSE faces mostly firmer Asian markets on Thursday 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:32 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922026 https://iono.fm/e/922026
Brown said hundreds of homes had been lost.

Oregon was the hardest hit state in the US west, where nearly 100 extreme fires were stoked by high winds and temperatures.

The towns of Detroit in central Oregon, Blue River and Vida in coastal Lane County and Phoenix and Talent in southern Oregon were destroyed, Brown told a news conference.

“This could be the greatest loss in human lives and property due to wildfire in our state’s history,” Brown said.

The governor gave no indication of how many people may have died, but one of Oregon's most deadly blazes was in 1936 when a fire destroyed the city of Brandon and killed 13 people.

Firefighters in Oregon, California and Washington retreated from uncontrolled blazes that forced tens of thousands to evacuate their homes and hundreds of thousands to lose power in the three states.

“It was like driving through hell,” Jody Evans told local television station NewsChannel21 after she evacuated Detroit, about 80km west of Salem.

Evans fled the largest blaze in the state, which threatened to join up with another blaze to the west.

Mill City, an Oregon town with about 1,900 residents 24km west of Detroit, had major damage on its outskirts and homes destroyed along the Santiam River, according to the mayor, NewsChannel21 reported.

To the south, parts of Medford, Oregon, a popular retirement location with more than 80,000 residents in the state's scenic Rogue Valley, were under evacuation orders or warnings as a growing wildfire closed a section of main north-south highway.

But as the blaze moved northward, it heavily damaged the small towns of Talent with about 6,000 residents and Phoenix, with about 5,000, according to local police.

Reuters ]]> Business News Thu, 10 Sep 2020 00:25:48 +0200 0 0 Oregon fires have destroyed hundreds of homes, says US state governor 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:56 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922011 https://iono.fm/e/922011
Tsotsi was concluding two days of testimony in which he laid bare how the Gupta family called the shots at Eskom with the blessing of Brown.

His testimony centred on events at Eskom during March 2015 when then CEO Tshediso Matona was pushed out to “make way” for Brian Molefe.

After the ousting of Matona early in March, said Tsotsi, the board shifted its focus to him.

Tsotsi said he was convinced that Brown was behind colleagues turning against him as they had never seen eye to eye since she was appointed to her portfolio in 2014.

Tsotsi said the purge started when board colleagues started having WhatsApp conversations without him and organising meetings without informing him.

At some point, the rest of the Eskom board, with the exception of Tsotsi, flew to Cape Town to meet Brown. There they formulated a charge sheet against Tsotsi and asked that he explain himself at a board meeting on March 19.

This was just over a week after the board and Tsotsi had suspended Matona.

Tsotsi said he asked for an extension to consult his legal representatives, which was granted and the meeting was pushed back to March 30.

At this meeting Tsotsi made representations to the board, insisting the charges against him were bogus. After his presentation, he was asked to step out for the board to deliberate on a verdict.

“At some point in the evening [they] sent a delegation to come and talk to me. It was Dr Ben Ngubane and Romeo Kumalo,” said Tsotsi.

“They made a proposition that if I agree to resign, they would drop the charges against me because they did not want a prolonged and messy exchange between me and Eskom.”

Tsotsi agreed to resign, saying he did so because he wanted to protect his and Eskom's reputation.

Tsotsi told the commission why he believed Brown was working with the Guptas. He related one occasion, not long after the board was appointed, when it had to formulate committees. Tsotsi said Brown's suggested committees were identical to those submitted to him by Gupta associate Salim Essa.

“I was very surprised, at that point in time it was very early in the new ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 23:10:37 +0200 0 0 Former Eskom chair says Lynne Brown and Guptas forced him out 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 2:25 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922083 https://iono.fm/e/922083 Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 22:47:25 +0200 0 0 Lockdown day 167: Latest Covid-19 numbers 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 0:18 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922040 https://iono.fm/e/922040
Banking and retail stocks flew — barely 24-hours after the devastation of government’s response to Covid-19 was laid bare in truly horrendous GDP numbers, as the economy contracted 16.4% in the second quarter compared with the first.

Shoprite, for example, rallied another 10%, taking its gains over 2 days to 21% since Tuesday’s results; Standard Bank gained 9% and Nedbank 8.9%.

As Piet Viljoen, one of SA’s stalwart value investors, put it: “some days — and on not very many days over the last 3 years — it is really, really good to be a value investor. Today is one of them.”

He added that he wasn’t gloating; it was “just a sigh of momentary happiness — actual satisfaction is still a long way away from here.”

It may be that people think it can’t get much worse. Or it may be that a big international buyer is sweeping up SA stocks, which would explain the rand strengthening back to around R16.65 yesterday.

Or maybe it’s just the jubilation of an imminent move to level 1 of the lockdown. Or, as FNB’s Wayne McCurrie said yesterday, maybe it’s just that local stocks are cheap.

Speaking of level 1, President Cyril Ramaphosa, in his first real engagement with the press in months last night, has committed to answering more questions from the press — something which we haven’t seen very much during his presidency.

Apparently Ramaphosa will be addressing the nation next week, and the expectation is that level 1 is around the corner — basically, a resumption of normal life.

For more detail on what Ramaphosa said, read the take of FM deputy editor Natasha Marrian here, and that of News24 here (

Maybe it’s the prospect of a return to normal life which has led SA’s most spectacle-fixated political party, Julius Malema’s EFF, seeking to reassert the relevance it seemed to have lost during the Covid lockdown.

The EFF’s grotesque form of politicking — a vicious social media blizzard followed by violent protest — has made all the news this week. If you haven’t yet, read Adam Habib’s searing article ( in the Daily Maverick on “our new generation of activists”.

Habib writes: ”President Cyril Ramaphosa has as his strategic goal the attraction of foreign investment to reinvigorate the economy. Yet ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 22:38:25 +0200 0 0 GIULIETTA TALEVI: SA stocks rocket — despite the ominous threat of EFF violence 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 3:32 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922084 https://iono.fm/e/922084 Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 22:17:59 +0200 0 0 Lockdown day 167: Pictures of the day 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 0:09 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922041 https://iono.fm/e/922041
We must ask: is our constitutional democracy working? How is it that members of parliament, such as EFF leader Julius Malema, openly trash the constitution and trample on human rights, even though they swore to uphold the constitution?

The EFF was responding to a racist advert on Clicks’s website, which offended many black people and social justice advocates.

But the main stigmatised group in the advert are black women — and amid the noise, we haven’t heard much from them or from the pioneers of natural black hair products.

One exception is a video in which a few young black women, including my colleague Diane Gahiza, take a stand on the advert’s intersectional racism and gender bias.

We all have a responsibility and opportunity to consign to the dustbin of history the stigmatisation of blackness and exaltation of whiteness, which was a legalised injustice under colonialism and apartheid.

Clearly, the attitudes and habits of those policies remain with us — this can be invisible only to those who refuse to see it. As the saying goes, there are none is so blind as those who will not see.

How these continuities express themselves varies.

Rarely today do you get the openly racist statements you got from Eugene Terre’Blanche, or Chief Justice Frans Rumpff’s comment in 1980 that "coloureds and black men stab people ... without any reason, except for an apparent lust of stabbing".

Nor do we get statements about black women such as when another court, in a rape case, said: "One cannot apply the same standard to Bantu women that one would ordinarily apply [to] a European woman."

Many understand bigotry differently. I understand it to range from unconscious bias to intentional racism.

Unconscious bias — whether it takes the form of racism, sexism, heterosexualism, xenophobia or ageism — isn’t motivated by a conscious intention to harm, demean or dehumanise. Still, while it may not plan to discriminate or harm, its actions may have this effect.

By not examining their unarticulated premises and the impact of their actions, even a well-intentioned ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 21:41:42 +0200 0 0 THULI MADONSELA: How did the EFF get it so wrong? 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 4:14 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922055 https://iono.fm/e/922055
However, the “crocodile” neither acknowledged the legitimacy of their widespread grievances against his leadership nor took any responsibility for bringing the country to this precipice. Instead, Mnangagwa argued that his administration “has been undermined by the divisive politics of the opposition, sanctions, cyclones, droughts and now Covid-19”, and blamed widespread protests on “a few rogue Zimbabweans acting in league with foreign detractors”. The president’s speech exposed a tone-deaf and intransigent government at war with its long-suffering citizens.

For the past two decades Zimbabwean citizens have engaged in diverse, valiant efforts to use every legally available avenue to expedite democratic reform. Many Zimbabwean citizens have made heroic efforts to shed light on the gross corruption and mismanagement that has characterised Zanu-PF's rule and created a staggering man-made disaster. They are now caught between a regime willing to go to any lengths to crackdown on dissent, the need to navigate the day-to-day difficulties of securing precarious livelihoods, and the fear of contracting Covid-19.

In the face of an unrelenting regime, and rising from the crushed hopes of July 31 2020 protests, Zimbabwean citizens have grafted the #ZimbabweanLivesMatter campaign onto the energy and anger of the global outcry of #BlackLivesMatter.

Can the SA government, whose president has taken an, unequivocal stance on #BlackLivesMatter, continue with an indeterminate posture on the plight of its neighbour’s black lives?

Their economic and political fate, as aptly observed by SA Institute of International Affairs CEO Elizabeth Sidiropoulos, is intertwined with its own and that of the region. SA is ideally placed to push for change in Zimbabwe, with the two countries sharing many social, political and economic ties. SA remains Zimbabwe's most important trading partner. Zimbabwe imports 40% of its total imports from, and exports 75% of its total exports to, SA. However, despite the countries’ growing stake in each other’s fates, SA’s response to the deepening crisis across the Limpopo leaves much to be desired.

Zimbabwe is now considered ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 21:36:04 +0200 0 0 SA needs more diplomatic muscle to crack Zimbabwe’s defiant government 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 6:32 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921981 https://iono.fm/e/921981
“I wanted to always play it down, I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic,” Trump told Woodward, the author and associate editor for the Washington Post, on March 19 in one of a series of interviews for his book, Rage, due for publication in September. CNN published audio recordings of excerpts of the conversations on Wednesday.

Trump told Woodward on February 7 that the virus was very dangerous and could be transmitted through the air — even as the president made public comments at odds with those statements.

“It goes through air, Bob, that’s always tougher than the touch,” he told Woodward. “The air, you just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed.”

Trump also told Woodward the virus was more deadly “than even your strenuous flus”.

The president said publicly in February and early March that the US had the virus under control. Trump repeatedly compared it to the flu and said it could fade away.

The same day Trump commented to Woodward, he tweeted praise for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s handling of the pandemic.

Woodward’s book reports that Trump was warned by national security adviser Robert O’Brien in a January 28 meeting that the virus “will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency”, according to the Washington Post, which said it obtained a copy in advance of publication.

“This is going to be the roughest thing you face,” O’Brien said, according to Woodward, who wrote that Trump’s head popped up at the dire warning. Trump told Woodward in May that he did not remember being told that.

Trump restricted travel from China shortly after. “The risk of infection for Americans remains low,” his health secretary, Alex Azar, said on January 31.

The book is based on 18 interviews that Trump gave Woodward between December and July, the Post reported. It also is based on background conversations with officials and other sources.

The book comes as Trump trails Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden in polls, with surveys showing Americans are displeased with the president’s handling of the virus. Trump has sought to shift blame for the pandemic, which has killed more than 189,000 Americans, to Beijing, regularly calling it the ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 21:06:21 +0200 0 0 Trump said he played down severity of Covid-19 to avoid panic 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 4:35 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922056 https://iono.fm/e/922056
Clicks found itself headline news earlier this week because of an offensive hair-care product advert that described the hair of a black woman as “dry and damaged” contrasted with a white woman’s hair that was “fine and flat” and “normal”.

The ad was rightly condemned and dismissed as racist, resulting in another company in SA having to do damage control at a rapid rate.

One would have thought Clicks, which runs SA’s biggest pharmacy chain, and the advertising industry in general would have learnt from a string of misjudged and tone-deaf marketing campaigns over the last few years from other companies.

A couple of years ago, Heineken was forced to withdraw a video commercial with the tagline “sometimes, lighter is better”, showing a bartender sliding a beer bottle past a number of dark-skinned people before reaching a light-skinned woman, after it came under intense criticism as being racist.

Before that, fashion retailer H&M apologised for a photo showing a black child modelling a hoodie sweatshirt with the words “coolest monkey in the jungle” etched on the front. In 2017, skincare range Dove faced a public-relations nightmare after a commercial, which showed a black woman turning into a white woman, conjured up memories of 20th-century racist adverts that showed black people scrubbing their skins to become white.

The list is unacceptably long.

Clicks rightly suspended an unnamed executive who signed off on the advert and two employees are facing disciplinary action. If anything, the commercial shows that Clicks still has a long way to go in ensuring there is diversity and inclusivity among its head-office employees.

The company’s commitment to urgently train employees about diversity and inclusion is welcome and, given SA’s racist past, it will not be a bad idea for other companies to embark on similar programmes to prevent racist gaffes from happening in the first place.

That said, it is difficult to sympathise with the EFF, whose antiracism protest against Clicks is being overshadowed by chaos, violence and criminality.

Clicks initially lost an attempt to secure an interdict against the protest before going back to get the court to prevent the party and its members from threatening its staff and damaging its property.

While EFF leader Julius Malema very clearly called ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 20:43:41 +0200 0 0 EDITORIAL: An offensive advert, and a cynical offensive 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 3:43 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921967 https://iono.fm/e/921967
Ahmed Kathrada Foundation executive director Neeshan Balton tweeted that a “towering giant” had fallen.

His family said when contacted they are preparing a statement.

“We are immensely saddened by the news of the passing of George Bizos, a towering giant in so many facets of our liberation struggle. Now all the Rivonia trialists are joined by the last member of their legal team. Hamba kahle, Uncle George,” tweeted Balton.

He died at the age of 91.

During the height of apartheid, Bizos, a practising attorney, dedicated his professional career to the fight for human rights.

He represented Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela in both the treason and Rivonia trials.

He also appeared at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), representing families of liberation heroes such as Steve Bantu Biko, Chris Hani and the Cradock Four, according to SA History Online (

During the celebration of late anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Kathrada's 89th birthday in 2018, Bizos called on South Africans to espouse the values of non-racialism as enshrined in the constitution that Mandela and the likes of Kathrada had fought for.

"In our constitution it is stated that South Africa belongs to all who live in it. There is a tendency recently which may affect this ideal negatively because there is a small group of South Africans who say Mandela betrayed South Africa in the constitution when he said South Africa belongs to all who live in it," he said.

"There is even a smaller group of people who say that there are people who are not South Africans but people from outside the country, and this includes certain religions.

"South Africa belongs to all who live in it and we must all support it. Neither you nor I are lesser South African."

Bizos was born in Greece and arrived in South Africa in 1941 as a World War 2 refugee with his father.

The Saheti School, of which Bizos was chair of the board, issued a statement of condolences.

“We are privileged as a school to have benefited from the life of a man who gave of his time and energy contributing to the shaping of Saheti as we know it,” the statement reads.

“As a community, we have walked alongside a man who has become an icon of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. As a great role ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 20:31:13 +0200 0 0 BREAKING NEWS: Renowned human rights lawyer George Bizos dies 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 2:28 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921947 https://iono.fm/e/921947
The London-based organisation said in a statement on its website on Wednesday that it had verified “gruesome footage” showing crimes against detainees in the northern Cabo Delgado province, and called for an independent investigation into the alleged abuses.

Orlando Mudumane, a police spokesperson, declined to comment and referred queries to the government. A government spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a text message seeking comment.

“The horrific videos and photos we analysed are evidence of the serious human-rights violations and shocking violence that has been taking place in Cabo Delgado, away from the international spotlight,” Deprose Muchena, Amnesty’s regional director for East and Southern Africa, said in the statement.

More than 1,500 people have died since violence erupted in northern Mozambique three years ago, and at least 250,000 have fled their homes. Government forces are trying to win back control from the insurgents of the port town of Mocimboa da Praia, about 60km from where companies including Total plan to liquefy offshore natural-gas reserves for export.

Bloomberg ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 19:12:49 +0200 0 0 Mozambique troops committed human rights violations, says Amnesty International 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:23 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921915 https://iono.fm/e/921915
After describing fairly accurately, for seven or eight paragraphs, the DA’s reasons for adopting the value of nonracialism along with our new policy on economic redress, Paton drops her big insight: “Black voters, who had been attracted to the DA because it had begun to look like it might evolve into a cleaner, more efficient version of the ANC, have already had that hope dashed by the events of the past year.”

Think about that for a moment. The DA, a liberal party committed to a social market economy, a capable state, nonracialism and the rule of law, is written off by a senior columnist and editor-at-large of a major daily newspaper because the party chose not to evolve into a slightly better version of a racial-nationalist party committed to state control of the economy, cadre deployment and wealth extraction for its elite.

Of all the poor analysis, wild assumptions and political bias in Paton’s columns — and there is plenty to choose from — it is this belief that the only viable alternative to the ANC is another, better ANC that is most deserving of dismantling. As long as SA, particularly the media voices who help shape our political landscape, remains trapped in the hegemony of the ANC, our country will remain trapped in its destructive cycle of low growth, unemployment, poverty and lawlessness.

If we want an alternative trajectory to the awful one we’re on, we have to be open to alternative solutions. But it seems many of the journalists and editors who have given us tens of thousands of words on state capture by the ANC in recent years have themselves been captured by the ANC. They cannot begin to imagine a SA not dominated by the liberation movement, even if its policies continue to drive us to ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 18:53:20 +0200 0 0 JOHN STEENHUISEN: DA is an alternative to the ANC, not an alternative ANC 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 5:19 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921916 https://iono.fm/e/921916
Producers of the tropical oil are reaching out to prison departments in search of locals for work in the palm industry that is considered dirty, difficult and dangerous, according to the Malaysian Palm Oil Association, a growers’ group that represents 40% of the palm-planted area in the country.

“Our prisons are quite overwhelmed,” group CEO Nageeb Wahab said by phone from Kuala Lumpur. There are thousands of people locked up for small offences. “This is the target group that we’re looking at.”

Malaysian palm growers had employed convicts since 2016, Nageeb said, but the search was intensifying as the coronavirus worsened the labour shortage. Malaysia, the biggest grower after Indonesia, was already short of about 36,000 workers before the pandemic, he said. Now that had risen significantly, which meant the country might see up to a 30% loss in output.

“The bullish prices experienced now cannot be fully exploited and this is going to be a big loss to both the industry and the government,” Nageeb said. Benchmark futures in Kuala Lumpur have surged almost 50% from their low in May.

The lack of workers has plagued Malaysian growers for years. Despite incentives such as free housing, electricity and social amenities, locals shun the labour-intensive process of harvesting palm fruit, pushing the industry to employ migrant workers from Indonesia, Bangladesh and India. Dependence on foreign labour is now more than 80%, according to Nageeb.

But now, as lockdown policies restrict travel in many parts of the region, and the Malaysian government looks to cut back hiring of migrant workers, palm growers are left with little choice. The industry is also reaching out to drug rehabilitation centres for potential workers.

Sime Darby Plantation, the world’s biggest oil-palm planter by acreage, said on Wednesday it could lose as many as 6,000 foreign workers this year as their contracts ended, and had hired only 300 locals. Intensive recruitment drives that began in July had mostly failed and the grower was now looking at prisons and drug rehabilitation centres for workers, according CFO Renaka Ramachandran.

“Like never before, billboards have been erected at estates and mills, advertisements placed in the media, and intense engagement with the authorities to entice locals are done on a regular basis,” Nageeb said. ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 18:49:18 +0200 0 0 Palm-oil industry considers using convicts amid virus-driven labour shortage 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 2:37 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922057 https://iono.fm/e/922057
The losers in question being the 1,800 US Marines who died in the vicious battle of Belleau Wood, halting the final German advance on Paris.It comes as no surprise that The Atlantic account is being denied with the long-overworked refrain "fake news".The report goes on to say that during the same trip, the president asked his aides: "Who were the good guys in this war?"Sorry for you, then, Gunnery Sergeant William Stockham, you who gave your gas mask to a comrade whose own mask had been shot away, saving his life while you drowned in the fluids from your own chlorine gas-filled lungs.It was people like you, Gunny Stockham, who made America great, and not men whose most cherished uniform is golfing attire and whose "leadership" consists of sinking 3m putts while the US burns and howls. ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 18:42:01 +0200 0 0 But do US voters see who the real loser is? 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:29 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921917 https://iono.fm/e/921917
“In recognition of the great progress the Iraqi forces have made and in consultation and co-ordination with the government of Iraq and our coalition partners, the US has decided to reduce our troop presence in Iraq from about 5,200 to 3,000 troops during the month of September,” Gen Frank McKenzie, the US commander in the Middle East, said on Wednesday.

Trump campaigned in 2016 promising to end combat entanglements in Iraq and Afghanistan and is reaffirming the pledge before the November election as he trails Democrat Joe Biden in national polls.

Trump sent more US troops to the Middle East during his first three years in office, but has recently returned to 2016 pledges to draw down America’s military presence in the region.

In January, Iraq’s parliament voted to expel American forces amid the uproar after the US killed Qasem Soleimani, an Iranian general who oversaw his country’s foreign military operations at Baghdad’s airport.

The following month, Nato pledged to expand its training mission in Iraq as a quick initial response to Trump’s call for the alliance to play a bigger role in the Middle East. That was after attacks on two bases used by American armed forces as retaliation for the air strike in Baghdad that killed Soleimani.

The German government is planning to extend the deployment of armed forces in Iraq and Syria, government spokesperson Steffen Seibert said in a tweet Wednesday. The country’s troops are “preventing the Islamic State from regaining its strength”, he said. The German parliament still has to approve the decision.

‘Reduced footprint’

McKenzie said in his comments during a speech in Iraq that the “reduced footprint allows us to continue advising and assisting our Iraqi partners in rooting out the final remnants” of IS in the country.

Trump’s relations with the military have become increasingly tense, with the president denying a report in the Atlantic magazine that he’d called soldiers who died in combat “losers”.

On Monday, Trump accused the US military leadership of waging wars to boost the profits of defence manufacturing companies. “I’m not saying the military’s in love with me — the soldiers are, the top people in the Pentagon probably aren’t because they want to do nothing but fight wars so ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 18:35:07 +0200 0 0 Trump to withdraw 2,000 troops from Iraq during September 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 3:06 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921899 https://iono.fm/e/921899
The Moria camp, which hosts more than 12,000 people, was “probably destroyed”, one Greek migration official said.

Athens declared a state of emergency on Lesbos and sent police reinforcements to the island to help keep order.

As migrants camped out in fields nearby or sifted through smouldering debris in search of possessions, deputy migration minister George Koumoutsakos said about 3,000 people affected by the fires would be temporarily housed in tents.

“The situation in Moria cannot go on (as it is) because it is simultaneously a public health and national security issue,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said in a televised address, adding that managing migrant flows was a “European problem”.

The cause of the fires, which broke out soon after midnight, remained unclear but authorities were investigating whether they were started deliberately after Covid-19 tests led to the isolation of a number of refugees.

“There was not just one but many fires in the camp. Migrants threw stones at firefighters trying to put out the fires,” Constantine Theophilopoulos, fire brigade chief for the northern Aegean, said.

The camp had been placed under quarantine last week after an asylum seeker tested positive for Covid-19. As of late Monday 35 migrants had been confirmed as having the virus.

Government spokesperson Stelios Petsas said camp residents would not be allowed to leave Lesbos due to the pandemic, though EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson said the European Union had agreed to fund the immediate transfer of 400 unaccompanied children and teenagers to the Greek mainland.

Some migrants tried to head towards the town of Mytilini early on Wednesday but police stopped them, eyewitnesses said.

Aid groups have long criticised conditions at the camp, which hosts more than four times its stated capacity, saying it is impossible to implement social distancing and basic hygiene measures there.

Mitsotakis said EU Commission vice-president Margaritis Schinas would visit Lesbos on Thursday, while the head of the European Council, Charles Michel, said the 27-nation bloc stood ready to mobilise support for Greece.

'Tragically predictable'

Refugee agency UNHCR said it had received reports of tensions between people in neighbouring villages and asylum seekers who were trying to reach Mytilini ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 18:31:13 +0200 0 0 Fire destroys migrant camp on Greek island of Lesbos 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 3:48 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921877 https://iono.fm/e/921877
Snowflake, a fast-growing cloud-software and data-warehousing company, filed an amended offering prospectus on Tuesday that revealed Berkshire will buy roughly $250m of Snowflake shares at its IPO price and an additional 4-million shares from another stockholder. The two transactions add up to a roughly $600m overall stake in the company if it goes public at the assumed price of $80 per share, the midpoint of the $75 to $85 current range.

Snowflake said it plans to raise more than $2bn by selling 28-million shares in the public offering.

Don't let the icy name fool you: Snowflake is poised to be one of the hottest deals the industry has seen in a while. When the upstart first filed to go public in late August, the same week as six other technology unicorns, one of Bloomberg's columns noted at the time how the company stood out as the most promising of the bunch.

With its leadership position in cloud software and open-ended opportunities, it has the kind of profile and prospects investors like to see in a tech IPO. Snowflake’s revenue increased 121% in its most recent quarter, which was significantly higher than most of its public cloud peers. Further, its Best-of-breed offering in the data analytics market, which is in the early stages of moving to the cloud, points to many more quarters of robust growth ahead.

As promising as Snowflake may be, it’s unusual to see Berkshire’s involvement because Warren Buffett and IPO are two nouns that are not normally found in the same sentence.

“In 54 years, I don't think Berkshire's ever bought a new issue,” Buffett said in a CNBC interview last May. 'They don't even call us,” Charlie Munger, Buffett's longtime business partner, added.

(They were apparently forgetting Berkshire's participation in the 2018 offering of Brazilian digital-payments company StoneCo. But that's the only example that comes to mind.)

Moreover, Buffett's deal making doctrine has always been to stay away from companies and industries he does not understand. It's why, at least until recently, Big Tech was never big at Berkshire.

Most consider that ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 17:59:03 +0200 0 0 Warren Buffett’s Berkshire bets on hot tech IPO Snowflake 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 4:07 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921901 https://iono.fm/e/921901
Corruption and financial mismanagement is a major issue in SA, as has been most notably seen in the recent scandal surrounding procurement related to personal protective equipment needed for SA’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as irregularities identified in the most significant financial relief measures.

Over the years there has also been little adherence to legislation that ensures government finances are soundly managed, while oversight has been sorely lacking.

Makwetu, who finishes his term later this year, has been at pains over the years to emphasise that a strong control environment and specific processes are the key to achieving objectives, addressing risks, ensuring compliance with legislation, and managing public-sector funds to the benefit of citizens.

On Wednesday, he launched six new guidelines on preventive controls to support oversight structures, accounting officers and authorities, and executive authorities to remedy governance lapses and weaknesses. He said the launch of the guidelines comes as the rest of SA is crying foul over the misuse of the resources that are so desperately needed.

“Hence this attempt to put these guides together to make sure that nobody can turn around and say I did not know,” he said.

Makwetu said if the preventive controls work properly, they will ensure that less money is spent on having to determine where things went wrong, as well as less spent on the cost of law enforcement.

“Prevention is so much better than [cure], as it saves the labour of being sick,” he said, adding that the guidelines are about making the country stronger, not putting in place new systems.

National Treasury director-general Dondo Mogajane said despite good governance and sound public financial management being universal tenets, corruption continues to be one of the greatest obstacles to development worldwide.

“Both locally and internationally, the Covid-19 pandemic has brought with it twin afflictions of widespread illness and gross corruption. For both Covid-19 and corruption, prevention is the cure,” Mogajane said.

He said even the most successful law enforcement instruments can only be effected after the crime has been committed and by then the damaging consequences of corruption have taken place.

The preventive control guidelines will add substantially to the ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 17:43:45 +0200 0 0 AG guidelines ensure politicians have no excuse to prevent mismanagement 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 3:01 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921859 https://iono.fm/e/921859
The Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) said the payments of the Temporary Employer/Employee Relief Scheme (Ters) had been suspended on Monday.

“The UIF has delayed the Covid-19 Ters benefits payments to mitigate risks identified by the auditor-general in the Covid-19 Ters application system,” spokesperson Makhosonke Buthelezi said.

“While understanding the frustration this might cause, we are committed to pay deserving and authentic workers,” Buthelezi said.

He said the fund would announce when the payments would resume. It was not clear when that would be.

This is the second time, in less than a month, that the payment of Ters has been suspended. At the end of August, payments were suspended for a day so that the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) could address weaknesses in the online system that could expose it to potential fraud.

The payment of benefits under Ters, funded by the UIF, was put in place to help workers affected by the almost six-month coronavirus lockdown. However, Ters has been hit by problems, including backlogs and unauthorised payments, which left workers unable to access assistance after companies cut jobs or imposed pay reductions.

The auditor-general has since uncovered alleged fraud and irregularities in the system.

The extension follows negotiations at the National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac), and the signing of the direction to that effect by employment and labour minister Thulas Nxesi.

“With the lockdown for some industries extended to September 15, it only makes sense for us to continue to shield workers from the worst effects of the pandemic by extending the relief payments, which have placed much-needed cash into the hands of workers in this country,” Nxesi said.

Business for SA (B4SA), a social partner in the process, said it appeared that the extension of Ters would last until the state of disaster ended, but final confirmation on funding availability for that was awaited.

The national state of disaster, already extended to September 15, is expected to be extended for another month.

The majority of the economy reopened when the country moved to level 2 of the risk-adjusted strategy last month, however, some sectors remain closed as SA’s borders remain closed.

The scheme was initially supposed to cover three months, from April to June, and was one of the main pillars of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s R500bn ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 17:41:52 +0200 0 0 Ters benefit extended, but payments suspended once again 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 3:17 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922042 https://iono.fm/e/922042
Will they launch a regional body for bureaucratic villains? A league for the oppression of journalists? How many cats will be stroked to a soundtrack of evil cackling? The mind boggles.At the least we can expect another whitewash — a grandiose political play that legitimises the gross abuse of power. SA is well on its way to replacing silent diplomacy with active ambivalence. ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 17:27:16 +0200 0 0 EDITORIAL: ANC’s Ace idea for Zimbabwe 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:19 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921880 https://iono.fm/e/921880
A fresh face will be better placed to take the hard-nosed decisions on how to shape the maker of Budweiser and Leffe for the future, especially one where the need for social-distancing may keep nightclubs closed and stadium crowds limited.

Brito, who has led the brewer for almost 15 years, has served the company and shareholders well, but if the Brazilian does step down next year, he should make a clean break, resisting the temptation to join the board. That would enable his successor to implement the changes that are necessary.

Brito transformed the company from a regional brewer to the world’s biggest through a series of blockbuster deals. The last of which was the takeover of SABMiller in 2016 that created what’s been called “Megabrew”. That transaction probably hasn’t created the legacy that Brito or the company would have wanted. It saddled it with more than $100bn in net debt at a time when it also faced challenges in emerging markets an this year, a global pandemic.

A management shake up earlier this year set up the possibility for further changes. Fernando Tennenbaum replaced long-time finance director Felipe Dutra, and several other executives were elevated. Last year, Olivier Goudet was succeeded as chair by Marty Barrington, former CEO of tobacco company Altria Group, one of AB InBev’s biggest shareholders.

Audacious deals probably won’t be on the agenda for some time.

Still the handover comes at a delicate time, so there might be an argument to opt for continuity, in the form of Brito joining the board. But this would be a mistake. Whoever’s appointed should have the freedom to pursue their own strategy without feeling under the shadow of their predecessor. For now, the only internal candidate is Michel Doukeris, who leads the North American business, according to the FT report.

Brito’s successor needs to tackle several pressing issues. The first is the borrowing burden. Though the company has made an effort to reduce net debt to $87.4bn at the end of June, it remains stubbornly high at almost five times earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation (ebitda).

More could easily be done by eliminating the 2020 dividend altogether, reducing stakes ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 17:22:36 +0200 0 0 AB InBev must allow a new chair to make their own changes 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 3:17 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922043 https://iono.fm/e/922043
Ethically and politically, it’s a slogan that has cost the ANC badly — both in public perception, and in votes — as senior leaders hide behind it, staying in jobs for which they’re either ill-equipped, or manifestly unprepared. President Cyril Ramaphosa is now moving to shift this thinking, demanding politicians step aside before they’re found guilty by a court of law. For a ruling party often crushed by due process and personal loyalty, and kept in check by labour unions, this is a big change.Now, encouragingly, this spirit appears to be taking root at SA’s laggardly state-owned enterprises — notably Eskom.Last week, as the country suffered another morale-sapping bout of load-shedding, Eskom CEO André de Ruyter moved swiftly to suspend the managers of its Tutuka and Kendal power stations.

In the statement, De Ruyter didn’t speak of their specific failures, other than that the breakdowns were "unacceptable" and there needs to be accountability."While it is true that the ageing fleet is plagued by legacy issues of neglect and omitted maintenance, and is therefore susceptible to unpredictable breakdowns, it is also true that this situation is exacerbated by serious apathetic behaviour by some management," he said.Critically, this tough love appears to have the blessing of both the board and the department of public enterprises.De Ruyter’s statement that the "previous culture of weak consequence management will no longer be the norm" is a step change for the utility and, let’s hope, the country.

It would be optimistic to think that a blizzard of consequence is about to descend on nonperforming staff at the hapless power utility which, notwithstanding that it has managed to accumulate almost half a trillion rand in debt, is unable to produce more electricity than it did a decade ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 17:22:01 +0200 0 0 EDITORIAL: Eskom: of blackouts and consequence 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 3:26 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/922058 https://iono.fm/e/922058
Some of this has to do with an improving health situation in the US from the pandemic (particularly around mortality rates); some of it has to do with the inevitable economic rebound that comes from restarting a national economy that was ground to a standstill in spring; and some of it has to do with renewed discord over social injustice.

Despite all that, Biden would still be the comfortable favourite to win the election on November 3 based on the polling — if it was going to be a fair election. But it won’t be. That makes it essentially a toss-up. America has never seen a presidential race like this.

The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted our lives, in ways big and small. It will also disrupt the way the US goes to vote, and how those votes get counted. With less than two months to go, polling places are gearing up for the logistical challenges that come with longer voting lines and social-distancing measures that will need to be put in place.

Fifty states carrying out what is effectively 50 separate elections — a legacy of the US electoral college — to choose the next US president has always been a Herculean feat. Even in less polarised political climates, past elections have been marred by charges of voter suppression, election administration mistakes, and foreign interference. Similar accusations will be flying around in both the run-up and aftermath of the November 3 elections.

But what’s different this time around is that these calls will be amplified by the sitting president of the US, who will add fuel to the fire in a bid to tip the scales in his favour. For Trump, claiming that the election is rigged isn’t an excuse — it’s a campaign strategy.

Never before in modern American history has the US had a sitting president actively trying to delegitimise the outcome of a US election for the sake of his own political prospects. Maybe the most egregious and direct assault Trump has launched of late has been against mail-in voting, which is expected to reach unprecedented levels in the midst of a pandemic.

Trump has admitted that he doesn’t want to fund the ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 17:14:58 +0200 0 0 IAN BREMMER: US elections will not be fair, making them a toss-up 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 3:52 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921881 https://iono.fm/e/921881
New technology and capabilities that have been accelerated through the Covid-19 pandemic have further disrupted banking, including the hitherto slow-moving wealth management business. This has shown the importance and growth of digital banking.

But with change comes caution and fear, so it remains key for banks to maintain the human, trusted side of advising on wealth.

The question is whether financial institutions will remain committed to the new models that have evolved during the crisis.

The pandemic has required changes in behaviour from clients and their advisers — and placed greater emphasis on digital solutions, enabling remote engagement rather than face-to-face interactions. No longer can digital projects be postponed. Medium- to long-term plans have been re-evaluated to meet the current needs of clients. Wealth managers need to look through the cycle to manage what the uncertain future will look like.

Clients expect tailor-made services suited to their individual needs, whether that’s easily accessible financial management platforms or face-to-face meetings.

The adoption rate for digital wealth management solutions has increased dramatically during the pandemic. Standard Chartered launched a mobile fixed-income platform in selected African markets at the beginning of 2020. By July, up to 50% of fixed income transactions were completed using the mobile app.

The diversification of digital product offerings in investments has given clients the option to choose where to invest based on market volatility during the Covid-19 situation. However, customers still care for an experienced professional who will translate and explain the strategies proposed by the systems, while offering support in the decision-making process.

The classic, relationship-driven business model, with its communication channels such as telephone, e-mail and face-to-face meetings, will not become obsolete, but there will be a shift from personal interaction to digitally enabled client interactions via intelligent solutions and social media. We are moving towards a hybrid model of people and technology.

Increased digital capabilities have given clients greater flexibility to choose where to invest. Produce sales rose to a record high in June due to increased accessibility through digital channels. Standard Chartered has experienced 65% digital adoption in online mutual funds throughout its African markets.

Mobile insurance

Diversification of the digital product offering can extend beyond helping clients to grow their wealth, to also enabling clients to protect their wealth. The bank experienced a 94% digital adoption rate in general ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 16:34:13 +0200 0 0 Banks must keep human touch amid digital shift 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 5:38 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921882 https://iono.fm/e/921882
The proposals, which the government has said would break international law “in a very specific and limited way”, have contributed to concerns that Britain could leave the EU’s single market in four months with no new agreement on trade.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson told parliament the bill was “a legal safety net to protect our country against extreme or irrational interpretations” of the Northern Ireland part of the EU withdrawal agreement — a binding treaty with the EU — that could threaten peace in the British province.

A copy of the Internal Markets Bill that certain provisions are “to have effect notwithstanding inconsistency or incompatibility with international or other domestic law”.

The bill, if approved, would give ministers the power to ignore parts of the Northern Ireland protocol of the withdrawal agreement by modifying export declarations and other exit procedures. It will be subject to debate and approval by both chambers of parliament before it becomes law.

Britain quit the EU in January but has remained part of the single market under a status quo agreement that expires in December. It has been negotiating a trade deal to take effect from January 1, but says it is willing to walk away if it cannot agree favourable terms.

Irish Prime Minister Micheàl Martin said he would speak to Johnson to express “very strong concerns” about the plans while his deputy, Leo Varadkar, called it a “kamikaze” threat that had backfired.

Asked how he could expect Britons to obey the law if his government was willing to undermine it, Johnson said: “We expect everybody in this country to obey the law.”

Reuters ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 16:19:18 +0200 0 0 UK says it wants to avoid ‘extreme interpretations’ of withdrawal agreement 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:46 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921883 https://iono.fm/e/921883
The news comes as the country sits with a cumulative total of 640‚441 infections and 15‚086 deaths related to Covid-19.

Speaking to Radio Islam‚ Mkhize said the worst was over.

“We can safely say we are over the surge. June‚ July and August were the worst months‚ as predicted by our models. However‚ we found that not as many people [were affected] as the model suggested‚” he said.

Mkhize said a number of factors could be attributed to the declining number of infections. “A major factor is that we embarked on containment measures‚ and there may well be other factors in the environment here. We are very grateful for the support we got from South Africans to try to contain the spread of the coronavirus.”

Asked when the county could move to level 1 and what measures would be put in place‚ Mkhize said President Cyril Ramaphosa would give an indication in a few days.

“It’s too early to say. We are still discussing all the issues. The president will give us a sense of direction‚ but we will be preparing to start easing to the next level‚” he said.

While some have expressed concern about further reopening the economy‚ Mkhize said the country had done well so far and normalcy needed to return.

“We were quite worried but didn’t have an increase in the number of cases when we moved from level 3 to level 2‚ which has really been good news because we do want to get back to normal activities, so we will have to move to level 1. We hope we can still contain the numbers. The past weeks have been very encouraging with no upsurge.

“We need to still keep some measures around mixing‚ gatherings and so on‚ but we need to start opening up more economic activities as we move on. We need to get our economy back to its normal footing‚ we need to get people jobs‚ we need to get people to earn incomes. Everyone must be able to survive on their own without needing further assistance from government‚” he said.

Mkhize warned that caution must be exercised to avoid another surge in infections.

“We are not out of the woods. We ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 15:54:54 +0200 0 0 Government is talking about moving to level 1 lockdown soon, Zweli Mkhize says 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 2:15 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921884 https://iono.fm/e/921884
The bill, currently before parliament, is the first piece of enabling legislation for the government’s plans for universal health coverage. It proposes establishing a central NHI fund, overseen by a board appointed by the health minister, that will pay for health services throughout SA.

The scale of alleged corruption that has recently come to light in the awarding of coronavirus contracts and the looting of relief funds has highlighted the dangers of inadequate oversight and accountability, DA health spokesperson Siviwe Gwarube said. “Our view is politicians should be kept away from procurement processes entirely.”

The NHI fund needed to be overseen by an independent board that was free of political interference, she said. The bill needed to be written with the worst-case scenario in mind, so that its institutions could withstand interference from “the worst possible” members of the executive, she said.

The ANC-led government’s management of the coronavirus crisis has been marred by allegations of corruption in the awarding of tenders, with lucrative contracts awarded to politically connected people. The scandal has seen president Cyril Ramaphosa’s spokesperson, Khusela Diko, forced to take a leave of absence after a company owned by her husband was exposed as allegedly winning a tender from the Gauteng health department.

Last week, auditor-general Kimi Makwetu released the first of a series of planned reports into the use of Covid-19 relief funds, exposing how some provincial departments paid up to five times more than the Treasury’s recommended prices for personal protective equipment.

His report also found relief benefits were paid to people who did not qualify, including prison inmates, public servants who were on full pay, and children below the legal working age. In a separate initiative, the Special Investigating Unit is already probing more than 600 cases of alleged fraud, corruption and price gouging relating to personal protective equipment, and earlier this week SA Revenue Service commissioner Edward Kieswetter said most companies awarded PPE contracts were not tax compliant.

Parliament has yet to resolve how to manage the deluge of public submissions it has received in response to the NHI bill, said Gwarube. It received 961 submissions during its tour of the provinces, has received more than 64,000 written submissions and is still debating the terms of reference for ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 15:29:03 +0200 0 0 DA sounds warning on NHI corruption risk 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 2:56 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921861 https://iono.fm/e/921861
A 2018 article by the International Finance Corporation’s corporate governance lead for Europe and Central Asia, Merima Zupcevic Buzadzic, lists ways in which corporate governance can help countries out of a crisis. She argued that corporate governance creates the framework to enable economies to recover from wars or economic meltdown. Buzadzic also made the important point that a commitment to corporate governance sends a powerful message to a demoralised country and the outside world.

Locally, the past decade and more have provided a graphic illustration of what happens when a country’s leadership is not focused on realising desirable goals. If the governing party had adopted the King IV principles, I venture to suggest that the president would not have had to pen that now infamous seven-page warning letter to his own party, but would rather be in the enviable position of detailing how well the country was rising to the challenge of reconstructing an inclusive and vibrant economy.

SA has a solid base when it comes to corporate governance (albeit not always pervasively and effectively applied in everyday practices). Our King reports have received worldwide recognition, and their various iterations chart the move away from a primitive compliance mindset to one focused on how ethical and effective leadership by the board and other governing bodies can achieve clearly defined outcomes, among them ethical culture, good performance, effective control and legitimacy.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) research shows that capital markets favour companies and countries where corporate governance is strong. Capital is highly mobile, and it favours well-governed markets. As former US Securities and Exchange Commission chair Arthur Levitt said: “If a country does not have a reputation for strong governance, capital flows elsewhere.” When it comes to capital, the destinies of companies and the countries in which they operate are thus intertwined.

Studies in the US, summarised in an article by Jay Eisenhofer entitled “Does corporate governance matter to investment returns?”, found that “the quality of a particular company’s governance practices and procedures positively correlates with both good corporate financial performance ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 14:47:20 +0200 0 0 Good corporate governance really is good for everyone 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 4:34 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921862 https://iono.fm/e/921862
Instead, the new Mulan is proving to be a political hot potato, reflecting the US’s fraying ties with China, and the choices companies face when operating in the highly politicised, but lucrative environment that is modern-day China.

The $200m film, which was made available for purchase online in the US and Europe last week and is set to open in China on Friday, has seen a string of controversies — all while the coronavirus knocked out its chances of getting a successful run in theatres.

An online boycott that began in 2019, when one of the stars spoke in support of the crackdown on anti-China protesters in Hong Kong, has continued. Now, Disney is facing heat for filming in a part of China where the government has detained as many as 1-million ethnic Uighurs in camps called “voluntary education centres”, then thanking that region’s authorities in the movie’s credits.

Disney is the latest US business to be embroiled in a political controversy involving China. Last year, the National Basketball Association was plunged into turmoil after a team manager tweeted in support of the Hong Kong demonstrators, triggering a backlash and a blackout of games in China. DreamWorks Animation’s movie Abominable stirred up a storm in Asia after the film featured a map reflecting China’s maritime claims disputed by its neighbours.

‘Addicted to China’

Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, slammed Disney on Twitter on Tuesday, saying the entertainment giant is “addicted to Chinese cash and will do just about anything to please the Communist Party”.

Disney has a lot at stake in China. The company spent $5.5bn developing its Shanghai Disneyland resort and has been expanding its smaller park in Hong Kong. The movie market there is also on track to become the world’s largest. But with both Republicans and Democrats focusing on China trade and cultural issues in the run-up to the US presidential election, the company could continue to find itself in the political crossfire.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re called before Congress,” said Stanley Rosen, a political-science professor and specialist on China at the University of Southern California.

High hopes

It certainly didn’t begin this way when Disney started work ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 14:36:43 +0200 0 0 How do you solve a problem like Mulan? 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 7:07 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921863 https://iono.fm/e/921863
Compiled by the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP), a think-tank that produces annual terrorism and peace indices, the ecological threat register uses data from the UN and other sources to assess eight ecological threats and predict which countries and regions are most at risk.

With the world’s population forecast to rise to nearly 10-billion by 2050, intensifying the scramble for resources and fueling conflict, the research shows that as many as 1.2-billion people living in vulnerable areas of Sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East may be forced to migrate by 2050.

By comparison, ecological factors and conflict led to the displacement of some 30-million people in 2019, the report said.

“This will have huge social and political impacts, not just in the developing world, but also in the developed, as mass displacement will lead to larger refugee flows to the most developed countries,” said Steve Killelea, IEP’s founder.

The register groups the threats into two broad categories: food insecurity, water scarcity and population growth in one; and natural disasters including floods, droughts, cyclones, rising sea levels and rising temperatures in the other.

The result is an analysis assessing how many threats each of some 150 countries faces and their capacity to withstand them.

While some, such as India and China, are most threatened by water scarcity in the coming decades, others, such as Pakistan, Iran, Mozambique, Kenya and Madagascar, face a toxic combination of threats, as well as a diminishing ability to deal with them.

“These countries are broadly stable now but have high exposure to ecological threats and low and deteriorating ‘positive peace’, which means they are at higher risk of future collapse,” the 90-page analysis found.

Killelea said the world now has 60% less fresh water available than it did 50 years ago, while demand for food is forecast to rise by 50% in the next 30 years, driven in large part by the expansion of the middle-class in Asia.

Those factors, combined with natural disasters that are only likely to increase in frequency because of climate change, mean even stable states are vulnerable by 2050.

The IEP said it hopes the register, which may become an annual ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 14:04:48 +0200 0 0 More than 1-billion face displacement by 2050, says report 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 2:40 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921864 https://iono.fm/e/921864
Lawyers Maksim Znak and Ilya Saley were targeted in separate raids on Wednesday, opposition spokesperson Gleb Germanchuk said. Znak managed to tell him that “someone came to visit us” and text the message “masks” before contact was lost, Germanchuk said by phone.

Opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya said Znak had been “detained, or more correctly, kidnapped”. Tsikhanouskaya fled to Lithuania under pressure just days after the August 9 election that she and her supports say she won, against Lukashenko’s claim of a landslide 80% victory. “Undoubtedly, Lukashenko is afraid of negotiations and thus tries to paralyse the work of the co-ordinating council and intimidate its members,” she said.

A growing number of opposition activists have been detained or forced to leave the country as Lukashenko tries to suppress the month-long protests against his rule following the disputed election. The police have renewed a crackdown against daily rallies in the capital Minsk, where about 100,000 joined a protest on Sunday.

After Znak’s disappearance, Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich is the only remaining member of the opposition’s co-ordinating council presidium still in the country and at liberty as of Wednesday.

Presidium member Maria Kalesnikava is now being held by the authorities in an unknown location after she ripped up her passport and jumped from the window of a vehicle during an attempt to force her, spokesperson Anton Radniankou and executive secretary Ivan Krautsou out of the country. Radniankou and Krautsou are now in Ukraine.

‘Kidnapping our country’

“First, they kidnapped our country, now they are abducting the best of us,” Alexievich said on the website of PEN International’s Belarusians chapter, of which she’s president. “We weren’t preparing a coup. We wanted to prevent a split in our country. We wanted a dialogue to begin in society. Lukashenko says he won’t speak to the street, but the street is hundreds of thousands of people who take to the streets every Sunday and every day.”

Alexievich wrote that unknown people were ringing her doorbell.

Lukashenko has refused to talk to protest leaders, blaming the unrest on Western powers, and sought support from Russian President Vladimir Putin. The two leaders are due to meet in Moscow in the coming days.

The EU and the US ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 13:47:50 +0200 0 0 More opposition members disappear in Belarus 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 3:09 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921865 https://iono.fm/e/921865
As trade talks with the EU continue, the prime minister will take questions in Parliament and is likely to be put under pressure by senior Tories who fear the move will undermine trust in the UK around the world.

The controversy was sparked by Northern Ireland secretary Brandon Lewis who said on Tuesday that the government’s plan to rewrite parts of the Brexit divorce deal it signed with the EU would be a breach of international law in a “limited and specific way”.

That admission caused astonishment and anger among the influential rank-and-file Tories who believe the abandonment of a legally-binding treaty would hurt future attempts to secure international agreements.

“How can the government reassure future international partners that the UK can be trusted to abide by the legal obligations of the agreements it signs?” Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May, asked in Parliament.

The UK needs to secure a trade deal with the EU by the end of 2020 or its economy will be saddled with additional costs and disruption when tariffs, quotas and customs checks are reimposed.

Roger Gale, another Conservative member of Parliament, said on Twitter that Britain’s actions will be “regarded worldwide as an act of bad faith” and that “honour is not for sale or barter.” Another senior Tory MP expressed his shock, speaking on condition of anonymity, described Lewis’s statement as a massive problem, adding it wasn’t the right way to complete Brexit.

Negotiating ploy?

Yet another, also critical of Johnson’s handling of the situation, suggested it could be a negotiating tactic by Johnson’s office in 10 Downing Street. Speaking on condition of anonymity, he described the move as part of the necessary crisis before a deal is reached.

“Threatening international treaties is a very risky move,” said David Henig, director of the UK Trade Policy Project at the European Centre for International Political Economy. “It is made worse by a government threatening to overturn a treaty that it agreed only eight months previously and fought a general election on the basis of being the right deal for the UK.”

The government’s proposal to change sections of the Brexit divorce deal relating to Northern Ireland has also triggered deep concern among officials. The UK’s most senior government lawyer, ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 13:09:34 +0200 0 0 Top Tories worry Boris Johnson’s Brexit plan will break trust in UK 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 4:53 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921847 https://iono.fm/e/921847
A dress rehearsal for national parliamentary elections due next year, this was never going to be a straightforward set of races. Russia’s economy is expected to contract some 4% this year, hurt by the pandemic and an oil crisis. Households are in pain. Anti-government demonstrations have persisted in Khabarovsk, on the Chinese border, and there’s evidence of discontent elsewhere. Finally, there’s the challenge to power in neighbouring Belarus, where marches have not abated.

An ailing Navalny adds a layer of risk.

The attack on one of Putin’s loudest critics has yet to prompt significant popular protests, perhaps in part because assailing opponents is hardly uncommon in Russia. That doesn’t mean the assault won’t encourage citizens to come out in greater numbers and support Navalny’s innovative approach to challenging a rigged system. Last year, his grass roots smart-voting campaign yielded results even where critics were kept off the ballot — most notably in Moscow’s city assembly race, where the ruling party lost a third of its seats. Researchers have found evidence of success in St Petersburg too. More may be inclined to listen this time.

Elections are troublesome for authoritarian leaders. The Kremlin has been remarkably agile in its efforts to retain control in regional and municipal elections, changing the rules frequently, limiting ballot lists and staggering votes.

When the popularity of the ruling United Russia party began to fade after 2018, its pro-government candidates stood as independents. This race will again lean on electronic, mobile and extended voting too — tools justifiable in a pandemic, but that also make it easier to massage results. That fact has not escaped sceptical voters, even if they welcome remote options.

But the cost of victory is rising.

The appeal of Navalny’s approach is that it works even in a system designed to combat dissenting voices by removing unwelcome candidates. He encourages voters to simply back the person best placed to beat the Kremlin pick, whoever that may be, and provides recommendations. This harnesses an often disparate opposition vote and chips away ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 12:29:39 +0200 0 0 How will the Alexei Navalny attack affect Russia’s voters? 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 4:59 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921816 https://iono.fm/e/921816
Brent crude was up 44 US cents, or 1.1%, at $40.22 a barrel by 7.52am GMT after dropping more than 5% on Tuesday to fall below $40 a barrel for the first time since June.

US crude was up 50c, or 1.4%, at $37.26 a barrel, having fallen nearly 8% in the previous session. Both major oil benchmarks are trading close to three-month lows.

The global health crisis continues to flare with coronavirus cases rising in India, the UK, Spain and several parts of the US. The outbreaks are threatening to slow a global economic recovery and reduce demand for fuels from aviation gas to diesel.

"Short-term oil market fundamentals look soft: the demand recovery is fragile, inventories and spare capacity are high, and refining margins are low," Morgan Stanley said.

Yet, the bank raised its Brent price forecast slightly higher to $50 a barrel for the second half of 2021 with the dollar weakening and rising inflation expectations, it said.

Record supply cuts by Opec+ have helped support prices, but with grim economic figures being reported almost daily, the outlook for demand for oil remains bleak.

China’s factory gate prices fell for a seventh straight month in August although at the slowest annual pace since March, suggesting industries in the world’s second-biggest economy continued their recovery from the coronavirus-induced downturn.

Reuters ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 12:12:16 +0200 0 0 Oil stems some losses but growing Covid-19 cases worry investors 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:46 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921783 https://iono.fm/e/921783
The broad Euro Stoxx 600 gained 0.7% in early trading, steadying after hefty declines a day earlier on a rout of tech shares, a key drivers of the stunning recovery for global stocks from coronavirus-induced lows.

London shares gained 1%, helped by a pound buffeted by worries about the chance of a no-deal Brexit that could hit Britain’s economy. Indices in Frankfurt and Paris also gained.

AstraZeneca said it has paused global trials of its experimental Covid-19 vaccine due to an unexplained illness in a study participant. The news earlier unnerved investors hoping the quick introduction of a vaccine would help accelerate the recovery for economies ravaged by the pandemic.

MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares excluding Japan slid 1%, with indices in Australia, China and Japan all skidding. Bond yields fell and the yen climbed to a one-week high of ¥105.93 to the dollar as investors sought safety.

Still, Wall Street futures gauges were pointing to a bounce for the S&P 500 and tech-heavy Nasdaq, up 0.5% and 1.4%, respectively.

The MSCI world equity index, which tracks shares in nearly 50 countries, was flat.

With Big Tech the main winners in the global recovery from the coronavirus, benefiting from stay-at-home spenders, investors were mostly sanguine about the sector’s prospects, even after the bruising sell-off.

The Nasdaq has lost $1.5-trillion since hitting a September 2 peak.

“This has been a correction that was probably not that surprising, given the move in August in the tech sector,” said Salman Baig, an investment manager at Unigestion, adding that the outlook for Big Tech is positive. “It’s exactly those companies that are new economy — they are benefiting because of their model, the industry, the virus.”

Those attributes have sparked heavy bets from the likes of SoftBank, which has traded heavily in tech stocks call options. The bets have unnerved investors worried about its exposure to the sector. SoftBank Group shares lost 3% in Tokyo, extending this week’s slump that has wiped $15bn from its market capitalisation.

Despite renewed appetite for stocks, safe-haven German government bond yields fell to their lowest in two-weeks. The fall in tech shares also boosted demand for US treasuries, even though heavy ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 11:43:29 +0200 0 0 World shares unmoved by tech stock losses and vaccine blow 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 3:49 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921784 https://iono.fm/e/921784
Inflation is running above 800%, reviving memories of the hardships of more than a decade ago when hyperinflation wiped out savings and pensions.

The Zimbabwe Nurses Association (Zina), which has more than 16,000 members, called for the strike to force President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government to pay US dollar salaries, but authorities say they are unable to do so.

The strike by nurses and senior doctors has crippled public hospitals, with non-emergency patients turned away and some babies stillborn due to lack of adequate medical care.

Zina president Enoch Dongo said nurses wanted to give vice-president Constantino Chiwenga, who was appointed health minister in August, a chance to resolve the dispute.

“When you have a crisis sometimes you need to give people a chance to resolve it. After some time we will review this decision,” Dongo said. “So we are telling our members to report for work, but only if they have transport money and if there is personal protective equipment in hospitals.”

Dongo said the lowest paid nurse earned 6,000 Zimbabwe dollars ($73) in salary and allowances monthly. The state statistical agency says an average family of five needs at least 15,573 Zimbabwe dollars to be not considered poor.

Chiwenga has said the government would soon table a pay offer for the health sector and stop paying medical bills for cabinet ministers and senior officials who seek treatment abroad to save on scarce foreign exchange.

Zimbabweans are growing impatient with Mnangagwa, who promised to revive the economy when he took over from Robert Mugabe after a coup in 2017. Mnangagwa says the economy is being sabotaged the opposition and some Western countries.

Reuters ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 11:42:53 +0200 0 0 Union urges Zimbabwe nurses to end strike amid pandemic 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:57 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921576 https://iono.fm/e/921576
Last week, at the launch of the rebooted Ghost (, Rolls-Royce CEO Torsten Müller-Ötvös told the BBC “that markets in Asia, Europe and the US were now ‘more or less back to normal’.”

According to the British broadcaster’s article here (, “sales for the first half of 2020 were down 30%, but now ‘times are starting to become better and better’”.

The new Ghost is billed to cost around £250,000 (about R5.5m). Rolls-Royce’s immense Phantom model will set you back even more, so you get the price ballpark we’re talking about for the marque in general.

Whether you think these beasts are bling and brash or brilliant, you can’t help but be impressed by the work that goes into making just one of them.

The craftsmanship is staggering. Watch the National Geographic Megafactories episode on the brand and you’ll see exactly what I mean. It’s been on DStv recently, and there’s a recording of it on YouTube (

Bespoke finishes and actual humans physically making the vehicles aside, what I really have a hard time comprehending is that so many people, globally, have the funds (or access to loans) to buy this sort of vehicle.

In January, Hypebeast ran this article ( detailing how, last year, the BMW-owned company sold 5,152 vehicles — compared to 4,107 in 2018. This was a new sales high for the brand in general.

What really blows my mind? That in a pandemic, amid unprecedented global economic uncertainty, sales for these luxe cars are still happening at all — never mind stabilising.

It seems bananas, but we all know the deal — it’s the middle class who’ve taken the hit in this harrowing past six months. Not the fiscally cushioned Bezoses or those Emirati sheikhs, Chinese tech playboys or PPE entrepreneurs.

This right here, the Ghost, is the kind of purchase that separates them from us mortals. We’re busy worrying about the spike in City of Joburg rates; they’re debating whether the stitching of the car seats will match the colour of their eyes.

Still, if you are one of the gang in the market for a car to set you back a couple of million, especially now that you’re emerging from your coronavirus cocoon ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 10:06:00 +0200 0 0 SARAH BUITENDACH: R5.5m Rolls-Royce shows who really took the Covid-19 economic hit 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 3:18 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921682 https://iono.fm/e/921682
Spot gold was down 0.3% to $1,925.20/oz by 2.39am GMT. US gold futures fell 0.4% to $1,935.20.

“Gold is edging lower as the US dollar’s strength continues. A deeper correction below $1,900 cannot be ruled out if the dollar stays strong and gold buyers decide to hold off increasing longs at these levels now,” said Jeffrey Halley, a senior market analyst at Oanda.

“Traders in Asia will adopt a cautious tone, preferring to wait for New York to open and clearer evidence as to whether the US dollar rally and stock market sell-off will continue.”

The dollar index jumped to a near one-month high against its rivals, making gold more expensive for holders of other currencies. Offering some respite to gold, a sell-off in technology shares sent Wall Street to its third consecutive session of declines, and a major drugmaker delayed testing of a Covid-19 vaccine.

Investors’ focus now shifts to the European Central Bank (ECB) policy meeting due on Thursday. While no major policy moves are expected since it has acted aggressively to shore up the virus-hit economy, investors will watch out for its inflation forecasts. Gold is used as a hedge against inflation and currency debasement.

Market players also awaited the policy meeting of the Bank of Canada on Wednesday, while the US Federal Reserve’s next meeting is scheduled for next week.

Elsewhere, platinum was down 0.4% to $897.94/oz. On Tuesday, the World Platinum Investment Council changed its forecast for the market in 2020 from a surplus to a deficit.

Silver dropped 0.8% to $26.48/oz, while palladium was flat at $2,274.63.

Reuters ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 08:51:58 +0200 0 0 Stronger dollar trips up gold 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 2:07 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921577 https://iono.fm/e/921577 Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 08:44:29 +0200 0 0 Lockdown day 166: Latest Covid-19 numbers 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 0:18 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921578 https://iono.fm/e/921578 Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 08:34:50 +0200 0 0 Lockdown day 166: Pictures of the day 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 0:09 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921672 https://iono.fm/e/921672
The biggest global health crisis in a century continues to flare unabated with cases rising in India, Great Britain, Spain and several parts of the US, where the infection rate has not come under control for months.

The outbreak is threatening the hope for a global economic recovery that could affect demand for fuels.

Brent crude was down 16c, or 0.4%, at $39.62 a barrel by 2.41am GMT after declining more than 5% on Tuesday.

US crude was down 24c, or 0.7%, at $36.52 a barrel, having fallen nearly 8% in the previous session.

“Stalling demand has been a concern for most in the market for a while [and] it is becoming more evident,” ING Economics said in a note.

Record supply cuts by Opec and allies, known as Opec-plus have helped support prices, but with grim economic figures being reported almost daily, the outlook for demand for oil remains bleak.

China’s factory gate prices fell for the seventh consecutive month in August, though at the slowest annual pace since March, suggesting industries in the world’s second-biggest economy continued their recovery from the coronavirus-induced downturn.

Reuters ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 08:31:07 +0200 0 0 Oil loses ground amid worry about a second wave 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:30 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921635 https://iono.fm/e/921635
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan slid 1.06%. Australian stocks dropped 2.47%, while shares in China fell 1.53%. Japan’s Nikkei skidded 1.12%.

US S&P 500 e-mini stock futures erased losses and rose 0.25%, white Nasdaq futures also rose 0.83%.

Euro Stoxx 50 futures were down 0.03%, German DAX futures fell 0.14%, and FTSE futures fell 0.29%.

Sentiment for equities and other risky assets also took a hit after AstraZeneca paused a late-stage trial of one of the leading Covid-19 vaccine candidates due to an unexplained illness in a study participant.

Treasury yields extended declines as investors sought the safety of holding government debt. Risk aversion also pushed the yen to a one-week high against the dollar.

A sell-off in high-flying US technology shares, fuelled partly by the concern about excess purchases of call options, has increased the risk of a larger correction across other markets.

“The performance of Wall Street is going to leave a heavy residue, and most noteworthy is how the tech names dropped down quite aggressively. Investors will take a close note of that,” said Tom Piotrowski, a markets analyst at Australian broker CommSec.

“The dramatic fall in oil prices in the last day is being seen as a proxy for global growth expectations. That 7.6% fall will certainly be resonating.”

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 2.25%, the S&P 500 lost 2.78%, and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 4.11% on Wall Street on Wednesday.

Among US technology names, electric-car maker Tesla plunged 21.06% on Tuesday, its biggest daily percentage drop, after it was excluded from a group of companies being added to the S&P 500.

SoftBank Group shares fell 3.64% on Wednesday due to the worry about the Japanese conglomerate’s trading in call options on US tech stocks.

SoftBank has fallen about 12% since sources told Reuters and other media late last week that it built up stakes in major US tech companies worth about $4bn and bought a similar amount of call options for the underlying shares.

Counterparties who sold the call options to SoftBank would have to hedge their exposure by buying the underlying shares, which likely contributed to the Nasdaq and ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 07:42:37 +0200 0 0 US tech sell-off upsets Asian shares 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 4:07 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921581 https://iono.fm/e/921581
To be approved, vaccines need to go through multiple rounds of testing to show that they’re safe and effective. A combined phase one and phase two trial of the Oxford vaccine has demonstrated that it is safe — with only short-term side-effects and no serious unexpected events reported — and that it elicits an immune response.

The purpose of a phase three trial is to assess whether this vaccine-induced immune response is strong enough to actually protect people from Covid-19. Proving this would pave the way for the vaccine to become publicly available.

How a phase three trial works

Usually a phase three trial has two groups, one receiving the vaccine being tested and the other a placebo or “control” injection, for example saline or a vaccine against a different disease.

To show that the vaccine is effective, there should be significantly fewer cases of the target disease in the vaccinated group compared with the control group. Depending on infection rates for the disease, a phase three vaccine trial may involve thousands to tens of thousands of volunteers.

For ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, clinical trial volunteers are located in countries across five continents: the UK, Brazil, South Africa, the US and India.

The vaccine is being evaluated in these different regions and populations of the world to ensure that results of the trial are “generalisable” — that is, that its findings can be said to apply to people outside of the groups tested.

In the UK we’re testing the vaccine in health workers, as they’re more likely to be exposed to infection than the general population. The trial there also includes volunteers from the public who are over 70. Older people are at higher risk of developing severe disease, so it’s important to know if they respond to the vaccine.

Oxford and our international partners have already vaccinated approximately 17,000 people in the first three countries selected (the UK, Brazil and South Africa), with half receiving a control vaccine.

Most volunteers are receiving a booster vaccination one to three months after the first, as data from our phase one/two trial indicates that this strengthens the immune response — although it’s not yet ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 00:24:29 +0200 0 0 Oxford scientists: these are the final steps we’re taking to get our coronavirus vaccine approved 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 5:07 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921582 https://iono.fm/e/921582
The contrasting images, created by Unilever’s Tresemmé brand and posted on the Clicks website, was of a white woman’s head with the description “normal hair” next to a black woman’s head, with “frizzy and dull hair”.

“Immediately, I saw it as racist,” Ramsunder tells the FM. “I told them: ‘There’s no way you can defend this — we’ve got it horribly wrong.’ It was really disappointing — I just couldn’t believe it had come from our organisation,” he tells the FM.

What mystified him, he says, is that the digital marketing team — two white people, two black people and a coloured manager — didn’t see the problem.

“I couldn’t believe they’d signed it off. I mean, we’re not an untransformed organisation, yet somehow we missed this as a team. I called a special board meeting for Sunday, and spent the weekend thinking what went wrong,” he says.

It’s what everyone has been asking. You’d think retailers would have learnt from the roasting H&M got in 2018, when it advertised a hooded jacket modelled by a black child bearing the phrase “Coolest monkey in the jungle”.

Thuli Madonsela, for one, calls it a “textbook case of unconscious bias”. Others were less generous.

Ramsunder has thought about this a lot. One answer is that Tresemmé has been sending marketing material to Clicks for years, so “maybe complacency crept in — the stuff gets routinely uploaded, and maybe we stopped asking questions. The oversight was obviously not strong enough.”

Tshegofatso Phetlhe, art director at M&C Saatchi Abel, says when she first saw the Clicks advert, “it just exhausted me”.

“It’s not even a case of the fact that they didn’t learn any lessons from the H&M issue, it’s that they clearly thought that diversity was just a trend that would disappear, not an ongoing conversation,” she tells the FM.

She says it should have been obvious to anyone that there was something wrong with the advert — the fact that it wasn’t, illustrates that the wrong people were in the room.

Most likely, she says, someone looked at the advert without thinking, and felt “this looks diverse”.

“At face value, it might have ticked the ‘diversity box’, but nobody really sat down and thought: ‘Is this substantively right ... ]]> Business News Wed, 09 Sep 2020 00:10:33 +0200 0 0 ROB ROSE: Clicks, the EFF, and the failure to think 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 5:54 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921292 https://iono.fm/e/921292
Von der Leyen also named Mairead McGuinness, a senior member of the European parliament, as the new Irish commissioner for financial services and stability and capital markets.

Dombrovskis, one of three executive vice-presidents among the 27 commissioners, will continue to oversee the EU economy and attend Eurogroup meetings of eurozone finance ministers.

Ireland lost the trade portfolio after Hogan resigned after allegations he breached COVID-19 health guidelines on a trip home.

Dombrovskis was already put in temporary charge of trade and faces a busy next few months as the permanent appointee.

The bloc is locked in difficult negotiations over future ties with post-Brexit Britain, faces trade tensions with the US, pressure to rein in China and a challenge pushing through a trade accord struck with Brazil and other Mercosur countries.

Dombrovskis will hope a transatlantic mini-deal that removes duties on US lobsters can help resolve more significant differences over aircraft subsidies for Boeing and Airbus as well as US tariffs on EU steel and aluminium — all in the run-up to the US election.

The commission also wants EU members to unite around a new leader for the World Trade Organisation, for which a two-month selection process began this week, and is seeking to conclude an overall review of its trade policy.

McGuinness has been an EU legislator from Ireland since 2004 and has served as the chamber's deputy head since 2017. She is a member of Fine Gael.

Dombrovskis and McGuinness are with the centre-right European People's Party (EPP), the largest grouping in the European parliament, which will have to vet both appointments.

Reuters ]]> Business News Tue, 08 Sep 2020 23:21:12 +0200 0 0 Former Latvian prime minister Valdis Dombrovskis named as new EU trade chief 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:56 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921293 https://iono.fm/e/921293
The legislation, which Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi blasted earlier on Tuesday as a political stunt that did not amount to a real effort to help the economy, also includes politically charged components such as greater use of tax-privilege funds for private school expenses.

Weekly supplemental unemployment benefits would resume at $300, down from $600 in the Cares Act that was approved in the spring. The extension of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) for small businesses will cost $258bn, according to a summary of the bill.

The bill does not include a second round of $1,200 stimulus payments for many lower- and middle-income individuals — a provision that both House Democrats and Senate Republicans had backed in prior versions of stimulus legislation.

A tax break for charitable donations would be expanded to $600 for all taxpayers in 2020. The Cares Act included a $300 deduction for individuals, even if they do not provide details in their tax returns, which is typically a requirement.

Small businesses could get loans equal to 2.5 times their average monthly payroll costs, with a maximum loan value of $2m, the legislation showed. It also provides the IRS with more resources to audit companies that take PPP loans.

As for schooling, the legislation would also create a two-year tax break for donors who contribute to scholarship funds that give students money for private school and homeschooling costs.

The bill would reduce liabilities for businesses stemming from the coronavirus pandemic as well as provisions meant to boost rare earth minerals mining in the US. It would convert a $10bn loan to the US Postal Service that was approved earlier to a grant and fund coronavirus testing. The $105bn for education is complemented by funding for private-school students.

Bloomberg ]]> Business News Tue, 08 Sep 2020 23:09:41 +0200 0 0 Republicans unveil slimmed-down stimulus bill 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 2:08 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921538 https://iono.fm/e/921538
In his short time in office, statements lamenting SA’s dismal economic performance have sadly become a regular occurrence. This time there was no attempt to sugar-coat things by describing the recession as “technical”.

Given that the economy has shrunk in seven out of 10 quarters since Ramaphosa became president, that description has always seemed rather unconvincing. Denial meant key structural weaknesses remained unaddressed as internal party political considerations dominated and slowed reform on everything from energy to telecommunications policy.

The extent of the drop in the second quarter, 16.4% vs the previous three-month period, is of course due to unprecedented conditions brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdowns in the world. In this context, the annualised 51% drop isn’t really the number to shout about as there should be a sharp rebound in the next quarter, reflecting the phased opening up of the economy.

However, the trend over the past two years shows that before Covid-19, SA was already in trouble. The country’s economic performance stood out for being lacklustre, having failed to track the recovery seen in peer economies since the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009.

In a speech at a Wits University function in June, Reserve Bank governor Lesetja Kganyago noted that SA had its worst decade of growth on record — worse than the turbulent 1980s and the 1990s, the latter period marked by SA having to manage its transition to democracy and ending with the Asian financial crisis. On a per capita basis, he said, South Africans had been becoming poorer since 2013.

Covid-19 didn’t cause our problems, but it made them a lot worse. Now, the need for action has never been more urgent.

The weakness in the economy has been diagnosed time and again, not just by private sector economists and multilateral institutions, but by the government itself in every Budget Review for the past decade. The Treasury growth strategy — the acclaimed Tito Mboweni paper — is already a year old, without an implementation plan in sight. By now, the cure should be clear for all to see. But in his statement on Tuesday, the president talked about “processes” that must still ... ]]> Business News Tue, 08 Sep 2020 22:26:35 +0200 0 0 EDITORIAL: Mr President, our stalled economy needs torque, not talk 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 3:52 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921262 https://iono.fm/e/921262
The country suspended flights and shut its borders in March as it sought to curb the spread of the coronavirus. The official infection tally is 7,388 people with 218 deaths.

The government said in a statement that domestic flights would resume on September 10, while international flights would start on October 1.

"All travellers will be required to have a PCR (polymerase chain reaction) Covid-19 clearance certificate issued by a recognised facility within 48 hours from the date of departure," the statement said.

A Covid-19 lockdown has until now closed all tourist attractions, forcing some hotels and resorts to lay off workers. The government expects the tourism sector to contract 7.4% in 2020.

Reuters ]]> Business News Tue, 08 Sep 2020 21:06:48 +0200 0 0 Zimbabwe to resume international flights from October 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:02 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921267 https://iono.fm/e/921267
The incredibly candid Durban native with the bohemian ponytail thought it fit to share his honest views. Now let’s get this straight, I’ve known my colleague for yonks and the most dishonest opinion he’s ever offered in the years I’ve known him was telling Sunday Times sports editor Bareng-Batho Kortjaas that he’d lost weight in all the right places after the Christmas break, and informing mop-haired ex-boss Simnikiwe Xabanisa that he was a snappy dresser and should have been on the cover of Vogue magazine.

Suffice to say, the notoriously fiery Chiefs coach was not amused when the analysis of his regime came to his attention and he saw it fit to fire back a retort. The hack was initially stunned when he saw the communiqué, and after he had digested the insulting tone of the German’s pen that morning, he sat up and quietly articulated his thoughts in a more measured manner.

But while my colleague likes to see the funny side of things and laughed off Middendorp’s very personal missive, the reality is it gave hint to a bigger problem. The fact is Middendorp cannot deal with criticism and has such a thin skin that he is willing to sacrifice anything to make his point when someone has the temerity to challenge him.

Maiden title

Put yourself in my colleague’s shoes: the coach of a wildly popular club that is in a commanding position to win a first league title in five years is so annoyed with a story written by a lowly journalist in Johannesburg that he sees fit to communicate his unhappiness to the prickly hack at all costs.

It doesn’t matter that it could potentially cost him a maiden league title as a coach in all his years on the bench. It also seemingly doesn’t matter that it could cost him the unique bragging rights of telling future generations that he won a league title on the 50th anniversary of one of the biggest clubs on the continent.

Hell no, clearly none of this matters when a lowly journalist challenges him and it makes perfect sense ... ]]> Business News Tue, 08 Sep 2020 20:23:17 +0200 0 0 MNINAWA NTLOKO: Middendorp lost his rag even before Amakhosi dropped the cup 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 4:02 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921242 https://iono.fm/e/921242
With public healthcare in Africa suffering chronic shortages of critical drugs, medical brain-drain, insufficient public healthcare funding as well as inadequate pharmaceutical production, are African governments taking appropriate measures to safeguard citizens’ lives?

About 80% of Africans in the middle-income bracket and below rely on public health facilities. Leading killers on the continent, often described as the “big three” include malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/Aids. It is important to note the transition over recent years to lifestyle diseases like obesity and diabetes. About 50% of under-five deaths in Africa are caused by pneumonia, diarrhoea, measles, HIV, tuberculosis and malaria.

According to the International Finance Corporation, healthcare in Sub-Saharan Africa exhibits the worst performance in the world, with few countries able to spend the $34 to $40 a year per person that the World Health Organisation (WHO) considers the minimum for basic healthcare. Africa’s capacity for pharmaceutical research and development, as well as local drug production, still has a long way to go. Fewer than 40 out of 54 African states have some level of pharmaceutical production.

Most African countries rely on imported pharmaceutical ingredients. The implication may be that citizens will not have access to affordable locally manufactured medicines as prohibitively expensive imports dominate the markets. Another implication is that the shortages of medicines in some public healthcare facilities like local clinics mean that they will often refer sick patients to larger hospitals for basic medicine. This creates a bottleneck at these larger facilities and diverts resources away from their core focus, the very opposite of what should be happening in system-governance terms.

Beyond the medicine shortages and bottleneck problems, several other factors inhibit access to healthcare, one of which is access to skilled personnel. A brain-drain of home-grown doctors migrating abroad amplifies the pre-existing challenges. Another factor is the sheer underallocation of resources towards healthcare. Current health expenditure as a percentage of GDP for Sub-Saharan Africa sits at 5.2% compared with a global average of 9.9%. Compounding the situation, corruption often diverts the little that is allocated away from where it is needed most.

The WHO defines having access to health as having medicines continuously available and affordable ... ]]> Business News Tue, 08 Sep 2020 18:43:21 +0200 0 0 One size does not fit all in Africa’s Covid-19 response 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 7:50 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921209 https://iono.fm/e/921209
As the pound fell sharply on fears of a no-deal exit, the government’s legal department head quit in disagreement with a plan to overwrite parts of the withdrawal agreement treaty signed in January.

Britain left the EU on January 31 but talks on new trade terms have made little headway as the clock ticks down to an October deadline then the end of the status-quo transition arrangement in late December.

As diplomats gauged whether Johnson was blustering or serious about allowing a tumultuous finale to the four-year saga, Britain insisted it would abide by the treaty.

Asked if anything in the proposed legislation potentially breached international legal obligations or arrangements, Northern Ireland minister Brandon Lewis said: “Yes, this does break international law in a very specific and limited way.”

“We are taking the powers to disapply the EU law concept of direct effect required by article four in a certain, very tightly defined circumstance,” he told parliament.

He added that the government supported the Northern Ireland protocol of the withdrawal agreement and there is “clear precedence” for what Britain is planning.

Trust at stake

Amid warnings from the EU that if it reneges on the divorce deal there will be no agreement governing the roughly $1-trillion annual trade, former prime minister Theresa May said the government risks serious damage to its international image.

“The government is now changing the operation of that agreement,” May, who resigned after her own Brexit deal was repeatedly rejected, told parliament.

“Given that, how can the government reassure future international partners that the UK can be trusted to abide by the legal obligations of the agreements it signs?” May asked.

The Financial Times said the government’s “very unhappy” legal head Jonathan Jones walked out in protest over the possible plan to undercut the withdrawal agreement in relation to the protocol for British-ruled Northern Ireland.

The prospect of a messy divorce between the EU’s $16-trillion and UK’s $3-trillion economies pushed sterling to two-week lows with traders betting there was more volatility to come.

“We need to see more realism from the EU about our status as an independent country,” said David Frost, Britain’s top Brexit negotiator, adding that ... ]]> Business News Tue, 08 Sep 2020 18:28:36 +0200 0 0 UK acknowledges it is breaking the law in a ‘limited way’ amid latest Brexit talks 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 3:10 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear https://iono.fm/e/921179 https://iono.fm/e/921179
SA is a country where the governing party has created nothing of value, and has destroyed, looted or trashed everything in sight via greed, open theft, wastage, negligence, incompetence, lies and racism, which has left us staring into an economic abyss from which we may not escape. We are in deep, deep trouble.

The only party that has clearly shown in areas where it governs that it is both capable and generally honest is the DA. Yet certain senior writers at Business Day seem to get great pleasure from demonising the DA and its leaders, past and present.

Helen Zille is a prime target. She is treated as Frau Hitler, despite the fact that all of your contributors know from personal experience with her that she is not, and has never been, racist. Perhaps she has overstayed her welcome and some of her tweets have been over the top, but she is undoubtedly one of the finest politicians this country has ever produced.

These same scribes tell us the DA is a white party. Why? Because much of its leadership is white? Maybe not the best strategy, but where’s the crime? Another falsehood is that the DA has no economic policy. That’s insane. Check its website. Its economic policy is detailed and way ahead of the sensible but incomplete policies enunciated by finance minister Tito Mboweni and the Treasury.

The problem, in my view, is that because of overhanging guilt from decades of apartheid oppression it is too much for these senior writers to support a party with so many white faces, despite their operational successes and high levels of integrity.

David Wolpert, Rivonia

JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an e-mail with your comments. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Send your letter by e-mail to letters@businesslive.co.za (mailto:%20letters@businesslive.co.za). Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number. ]]> Business News Tue, 08 Sep 2020 17:59:32 +0200 0 0 LETTER: Why the anti-DA rhetoric? 0 0 TimesLIVE Podcasts full 1:49 BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear