ANN CROTTY: Becoming a basket case
Sadly, self-interest trumps all in today’s markets
At some stage during Coronation Fund Managers’ two-hour AGM last week, I felt I might be slipping into Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables”. Not the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic part of the basket, but the part that doesn’t get it any more. The part that doesn’t understand when or why things got so out of hand; why the haves have a ridiculous amount of everything — not just money, power and access, but also hope — and the have-nots have so little of anything, including hope. It might have been when the Coronation board was trying to persuade shareholder activist Theo Botha that the R600m or so allocated to employees was reasonable. Botha was working on the assumption most of it was going to a relatively small section of the group’s 290 employees. But there wasn’t enough information to even hazard a guess on that.The board’s attitude seemed to be that Botha doesn’t understand because he’s just not sophisticated enough. If he were sophisticated he’d unders...
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