BizNews Radio

In their latest BizNews chat, Chris Steyn and Political Commentator Solly Moeng cover the deepening mystery surrounding the apparent suicide in Paris of former Police Minister and ambassador Nathi Mthethwa; Patriotic Alliance (PA) leader Gayton McKenzie’s “nepotistic” appointments of Minister of Arts and Culture; the relationship between Tenderpreneurs Cat Matlala and Hungwani Maumela, the nephew by marriage of President Cyril Ramaphosa; the factionalised African National Congress (ANC) naming over forty candidates for mayors in eight metros. “What are we to do with all these people who play such crucial, toxic, dangerous roles for South Africa…Let us ignore these politicians who think that we are not one and show them we are..We should come together and take back this country.” In some good news, the South African Revenue Service (SARS) has intercepted a R167-million Cocaine shipment at OR Tambo. “They should also trace the masterminds…Of course they will assassinate, they will kill people, they will offer bribes, they will probably blackmail people. But we should find these people. We should be known as a country that says no - and that does something about it. For now, we are a country where everything goes. Everything goes. And it has got to stop at some point.”

Illegal mining kingpins are in the crosshairs when a new Illegal Mining Bill becomes law with R100 million fines and 30-year prison sentences on the cards. However, Independent Governance Expert Richard Chelin tells Chris Steyn that in the six years it has taken the government to draft the bill, illegal mining has gone from “a regulatory headache to a national security crisis…but beyond the money, we're talking about sinkholes, we're talking about environmental degradation, water contamination. We've seen damaged infrastructure. We've seen what explosions have done recently in West Rand. And also we've seen the rise of violent crime in mining communities. Day in, day out, week in, week out we've seen on the news gangs, Zama Zama gangs, fighting each other and innocent individuals and people getting caught in the crossfire. But the one thing is the cost is enormous and we've been paying it while waiting for the bill to come through.”

He's run money through three decades of market cycles, from Allan Gray to Investec to his own boutique, RECM. Now Piet Viljoen stands in front of a room of investment professionals and calls a chunk of his own industry's output, by his own word, bullshit. Jargon, product complexity, benchmarks, forecasts, fee layers: Viljoen takes a scalpel to each one and asks a single question of every part of the machine: does removing this make you worse off? His answer, most of the time, is no. This is via negativa applied to your money, and it is not comfortable listening for the industry that profits from complexity.

In today’s episode, Piet le Roux discusses "state-proofing" South Africa and urges a shift in United States foreign policy. David Shapiro unpacks Covid-19's lasting scars on global markets and the Federal Reserve's recent inflation struggles. We also explore how the investment industry uses Rube Goldberg-like complexity to generate revenue rather than solve uncertainty. Finally, catch up on Wall Street’s rally, Nvidia's earnings, and plunging retail stocks.

David Shapiro has watched the market from a JSE trading floor since 1972, through every crisis from the Asian meltdown to the pandemic. At BNC#9 he makes the case that a single 2022 invention quietly kept the global economy afloat despite punishingly high interest rates, and explains why the new Fed chair's own words about inflation are more revealing than they sound. He also names the industries already fading out of relevance, and where he's looking for the next decade of returns.