THICK END OF THE WEDGE
PETER BRUCE: The IMF is hovering: let’s do the maths
Scrounging around for ideas is common among people who write columns. I write three a week so I scrounge a lot. Fortunately, SA provides a lot of material. At the moment the news is all bad. The rand was hammered earlier in the week when the Turkish lira fell out of bed. We briefly saw a R15 dollar. Then it calmed a little and on Wednesday it crashed again after Moody’s said our fiscal consolidation (debt reduction) was going to take longer than we had led it to believe. Never forget that the rand, relative to our GDP, is the most heavily traded currency in the world; the equivalent of about 17% of our economy is traded in rand every day. That’s huge. Whenever emerging markets are flavour of the month or under attack, the rand will star.I scrounged that off Twitter, just as I did the fact that no matter how much of the pressure on the rand may be external, we ignore our own contribution to our troubles at our peril. The issue of land expropriation without compensation is going to so...
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