We have many clients in South Africa who are content with their lifestyle and have no plans to move abroad any time soon. They enjoy the weather, have close family ties in the country, and believe that they can sustain their way of life into retirement and beyond. The question that many of them ask…
As factional politics in the ANC comes to a head, it is obvious to state that there will be winners and losers. The $64 000 question is: Who will win and by how much? In this high stakes contest, the policy and future prospects of South Africa depend on the outcome. Politics, not economics, is the…
Given South Africa’s structural inequalities, historic injustices and high poverty, taxing the rich to uplift the poor is an idea that resonates with many stakeholders in our society. It’s thus unsurprising that the debate about whether the government should introduce a wealth tax has flared up again at a time when there’s an urgent need…
Investors often seek our advice as to which currency/currencies we would recommend for their offshore investments and why. Given how many funds are run from the UK and the Channel Islands, it’s a question that has come up more often since the Brexit vote sent the pound tumbling in 2016, and more recently in 2020…
Over the years, clients have sought advice about structured products, especially at times when the markets are in turmoil or when they are concerned about downside risk in equities markets. Such products, also known as structured notes, are vehicles that offer a guaranteed return on investment, within certain parameters. These products are generally packaged by…
On predicting uncertainty “We have in economics adopted an approach to thinking about uncertainty which assumes you can attach probabilities to more or less every conceivable event and that choice under uncertainty framework has dominated economics for 50 years … and that is simply not how people either could or do think about uncertainty.” On…
In my previous article in this two-part series, I looked at how consumer behaviour is changing as a result of the ongoing Covid-19 crisis. As people’s attitudes, spending patterns, working lives, and behaviours evolve to accommodate a new reality, each enterprise in the world will also need to adjust how it operates to minimise the damage…
We live in strange times with little visibility into what lies ahead for the markets in the months to come. Despite Covid-19 plunging every major economy in the world into a downturn for at least one quarter of the year, stock exchanges worldwide and especially in the US have enjoyed an extraordinary recovery, albeit with…
In the times of the ancients, rulers like Roman emperor Nero would ‘debase’ their sovereign currencies by adding lower value metals to gold and silver coins to increase the supply of money. Throughout history, this has seldom ended well because of the inevitable inflation in consumer prices that follows currency debasement. In today’s world of…
