BizNews Radio

The South African rand looks resilient - but George Glynos warns that appearances are dangerously deceiving. In this interview with Irakli, ETM Analytics Co-Founder and Head of Research lays out exactly why the risks are building asymmetrically against the rand - and why complacency could prove costly.

On the scale of the current oil shock, Glynos is unambiguous: "You're talking about a hit of in excess of 20-odd percent of the world's oil supply. Compare that to the 1973 embargo or the 1979 Iranian revolution — those removed 6 to 7%. This is categorically different."

On why the rand hasn't moved yet — and why that itself is the warning sign: "The Rand hasn't responded strongly to it yet, which ultimately means that it is a little vulnerable. Should the shock extend, the greater the likelihood that the Rand will come under some pressure."

And on South Africa's fuel supply specifically, Glynos raises an alarm few are talking about: "If we're not able to source that refined fuel from the Persian Gulf, then all of a sudden I think we're going to find ourselves in a more stressed environment — with vast implications for the economy. How mines run, how high-energy sectors run."

The verdict is stark: either this war ends quickly and the terms of trade recover — or the rand adjusts sharply to reflect the damage already done to South Africa's trade balance. There is, Glynos says, no third option.

Martin Freeman and Justin Clarke unpack why US industrial real estate — particularly “shallow bay” facilities linked to manufacturing and logistics — is emerging as a standout opportunity. They discuss the impact of AI-driven data centre investment, America’s onshoring push, interest rate dynamics, and Accretiv’s latest Alabama acquisition tied to aerospace and renewable energy supply chains. The discussion also covers investor returns, risks, liquidity concerns, and the evolving outlook for US commercial property.

BRICS is suffering an identity crisis — and its foreign ministers' gathering in New Delhi has done nothing to resolve it. In this interview with Irakli, Platform for African Democrats custodian Ray Hartley asks the defining question: "What is the point of BRICS?" He warns that the bloc has become little more than pageantry: "The summit in India will be high-profile — guards of honour, jets flying overhead, the full spectacle. And then at the end of it, there will be no serious results, because they simply can't agree on much." On BRICS claiming to represent the Global South, Hartley is blunt: "Two of these countries — China and Russia — are not really part of the Global South. China is one of the most developed economies in the world. And then you have the giant oil states: Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iran. These are super-rich countries with vast resources. They don't represent the Global South. They simply claim to." And while BRICS foreign ministers were exchanging pleasantries in New Delhi, Xi Jinping and Donald Trump were holding a bilateral summit — a contrast Hartley says speaks for itself: "It's really just a sideshow. It has no real-world effects — not economically in terms of trade or investment, and not politically either. It simply lacks coherence."

Infrastructure failure has become a core business risk in South Africa. In this interview with Chris Steyn, international ISO standards and systems implementation specialist Muhammad Ali warns: “...infrastructure is not just decaying, it's going down the drain to its limit’. He notes that while systems and standards exist, “it's just up to the right leadership, the right party to acknowledge and implement effectively”. Ali describes how Barcelona, for instance, has optimised service delivery with an App that connects citizens to municipalities “...they take a picture of that particular pothole and then the smart cameras verify and validate that that pothole is there. That particular ticket that gets logged in gets quickly sent out to the relevant community, the SMMEs and QSEs or contractors-to-be who are approved and vetted and validated to give a quotation on exactly who can do this work with the best price, the best quality, the best time. And automatically, without any human intervention, it denotes through a criteria of selection who the vendor is and issues them with an order. They are given three days to be able to complete this exercise with a picture and the camera validating this, and they are paid within seven days.” Meanwhile, back here “these syndicates and extortion in South Africa has become a movie. We're living in Hollywood and I think Hollywood is actually getting scripts from South African day-to-day lifestyles….So we've got a long way to go in terms of having the right leadership, having the right… accountability.”

In today's BizNews Daybreak we cover the finalized EU-US trade deal text and the Senate's push to withdraw from hostilities in Iran.

Meanwhile, South African farmers warn that the regional foot and mouth disease rollout is failing, urging a shift to mass vaccination campaigns.

Finally, we examine political maneuvering surrounding the GNU in South Africa and a serious, undetected Ebola strain outbreak in the DRC.