Business

Even the Christian world is embracing Islamic banking and finance as a response to the international economic crisis. The Vatican has endorsed the values of Islamic finance as a solution to the problems in the world of conventional, interest-based finance. It has stated that Western banks should carefully examine Islamic financial regulations in order to […]

President Jacob Zuma says we have to create 500 000 jobs by year-end. As a nation of dedicated whingers, we look at that stat, sit back and say, “We can’t do it”. Actually if we can’t do it then we need to figure out how much financial pain, we the employed, are able to bear in […]

While I was trawling through my favourite meme blogs, I happened across this trenchant piece of social commentary on GraphJam. “Where a philosophy degree gets you in real life,” the pie chart demonstrates — 95% of the chart is red, and represents “Nowhere”, 5% of the chart is green, and represents “Also nowhere”. Is this […]

The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) may have a measure of unlikely sympathy from Investec, one of the country’s champions of private capital, after the trade union federation called for Reserve Bank governor Tito Mboweni to be replaced. While Investec has not gone so far as to call for a new governor to […]

So, a businessman Aussies love to hate says Australia is backward and racist. “I would say that Australia definitely is different [from] the US,” he told the BBC. “In many ways it was like stepping back in time.” Australian political and business leaders are flabbergasted. Sol Trujillo — not the Sol you might have been […]

Immediately after the election, and referring to President Jacob Zuma selecting his first cabinet, I observed that the vested and conflicting interests of business and labour was going to be a particularly tricky political tightrope that he needed to walk. On Friday, and while we are still digesting the appointments in cabinet relating to this […]

As Louis Gossett Jr advises in the Windhoek ads, “Keep it real”. When it comes to interest rates and alcohol, real is better. So forget about inflation-targeting. Let’s have a new target: a positive real interest rate of say 3%. What this simply means is that if inflation is 14% then the Reserve Bank’s influential […]

I am getting just a little bit irritated by food retailers who shed crocodile tears over the difficulties of their cash-strapped customers, while raking in ever-increasing profits. Take, for example, Spar, which reported first-half financial results this week. Doing business in these challenging times, CEO Wayne Hook said, is a “struggle”. With double-digit food inflation […]

When my friend Sara joined a reputable graduate programme in Johannesburg, she was assured that even though the company kills people for a living (they manufacture a kind of poison); the organisational culture at work would be categorically awesome. She was promised personal development mixed with out-of-the-box thinking (necessary if you want people to buy […]

Government has threatened to ban labour brokers after the next election. The claim is made that the system lowers the wages of workers and encourages casual work. Labour Minister Membathisi Mdladlana first made the call when he was campaigning in Langa in December last year. Mdladlana told residents that the ANC plans to ban labour […]

From the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War we have, as a global economy, seen a sustained period of hyperinflation. I have no idea why there has been such an upward shift in pricing levels but I doubt that it has anything to do with people […]