EDITOR’S LUNCHBOX: S&P and earth tremors rattle SA on Monday

Stories of Note

Bytes from the digital world

As if S&P Global Ratings’ cutting SA’s sovereign credit rating to junk — with Moody’s and Fitch threatening to follow suit soon — was not rattling enough, South Africans were further shaken by a series of earth tremors on Monday.

Colin Coleman, head of Goldman Sachs SA, said: "There’s only one thing I want to say: South Africans have President Zuma to thank for the downgrade."

For dolphins, having an octopus’s tentacle come out your throat and choke you to death is not just a horror movie cliche, which is why they like their octopuses well tenderised.

In My Opinion

Matters of debate

SA’s new finance minister, Malusi Gigaba, is a talker — which would be a good thing if he did not talk so much nonsense.

Lily Gosam explores President Jacob Zuma’s motives for sabotaging SA’s economy. Probable reasons include helping his friends, the Gupta brothers, out of their bank squeeze and breaking open the safe to civil servants’ R1.85-trillion pension savings.

Finding Alpha

The long and the short of the markets

Pick n Pay denies the reason it overhauled its Smart Shopper loyalty programme was because it was too generous.

Elon Musk took to Twitter to taunt speculators who shorted shares of his car maker Tesla after its market capitalisation surpassed Ford on Monday.

Oh, Very Twitty

The lighter side of the web

Very Visual

Graph of the day

Data trends reveal a picture of deteriorating support for the ANC. At a national level, its performance in the 2016 local government elections was nothing short of disastrous. While the party polled at consistently above 60% between 2000 and 2014, support plummeted by 12 percentage points between 2014 and 2016, from 66% in 2014 to 54% in two short years.

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