Stories of note
Bytes from the digital world
Thursday kicked off with US President Donald Trump panicking the rand by weighing in on SA’s land debate.
I have asked Secretary of State @SecPompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers. “South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.” @TuckerCarlson @FoxNews
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2018
Trump’s tweet appears to have been prompted by Fox News host Tucker Carlson telling his viewers that South African "racist land seizures begin".
Trump’s tweet coincided with The Financial Times publishing President Cyril Ramaphosa’s defence of his land policy.
In my opinion
Matters of debate
Banks are reluctant to enter the land expropriation debate, despite the ANC’s policy undermining the foundation of their industry.
Hurting your upmarket competitors by starting price wars with products you hardly sell, such as swimming pool chemicals, was one of the retail tricks Tim Cohen learnt from Shoprite’s founder Whitey Basson during an interview.
Finding alpha
The long and the short of the markets
Presenting Shoprite’s first earnings decline in 18 years, CEO Pieter Engelbrecht said: "In my memory it’s the toughest [year] that I can recall, but we’re not going to stand here today and ramble on with a lot of excuses."
Sibanye-Stillwater’s gold division had a terrible interim period, with a record number of fatalities and a low gold price contributing to the sharp fall in the gold and platinum miner’s profit for the period.
Oh, very twitty
The lighter side of the web
Trump’s tweet an interesting little sociological experiment for SA. Let’s see how quickly his madness infects SA. If those who oppose EWC, as do I, had any sense they’d realise their cause is done no good being supported by a racist and pathological liar.
— Gareth van Onselen (@GvanOnselen) August 23, 2018
Very visual
Graph of the day
Before Trump’s tweet in the early hours of Thursday morning, the rand had already weakened from about R14.14 to worse than R14.30 to the dollar. It continued its slide to R14.34/$, but to what extent Trump is to blame is unclear.
© Business Day
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