Tag: Izak Odendaal

It’s a new year but the global inflation debate continues to rage. Few things are as important for longer-term market behaviour as inflation; so this is important stuff, but also difficult since the big inflation shifts of the past 60 years (first up, then down, then way down) were largely unexpected.

Hindsight, they say, is 20/20 vision. This being the year 2020, it turned out to be truer than ever before. For investors, and all of us really, there was so much about this year that was unpredictable, surprising and shocking.  With 11 months of the year now past, and in our penultimate note for 2020, we can look back at what investors might have known and could have done.

Like a good Hollywood thriller, the US election kept us in suspense all week with plenty of plot twists and turns. Billions of people around the world spent days glued to their screens, as the vote count was drawn out by a high voter turnout and a large increase in mail-in ballots.

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin infamously noted that while a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is simply a statistic. That grim milestone has now been passed by the coronavirus. It has claimed more than a million lives worldwide.

The idea of American Exceptionalism has been a favourite rhetorical device of US presidents since the days of John F. Kennedy. It goes beyond conveying the sense that the country is richer and more powerful than other countries, but also that its unique culture and historical path render its destiny superior.

Although we all know the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 first emerged in China, there is some debate as to exactly when. As it spread through the city of Wuhan, authorities took what at the time seemed like an extraordinary decision to place the whole metropolitan area in quarantine from late January onwards.

A loan from the IMF could instil investor confidence – with or without conditions. The previous announcement by the Minister of Finance Tito Mboweni that the South African Government is considering approaching the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for financial assistance amid the COVID-19 pandemic has drawn quite a bit of criticism.

The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide surpassed one million last week. This number probably still understates the true spread of the coronavirus given the lack of testing in many places, and the fact that some infected persons don’t show symptoms.

There was more salt in the wounds for South Africa when Fitch announced that they were downgrading government's credit rating another notch, this follows the announcing by Moody's a week ago that they were also downgrading the credit rating.

The global economy has been hit by five shocks as the coronavirus spread rapidly. This could not have been predicted, though with hindsight the market was initially much too complacent. The situation is so uncertain now that a strategy based on trying to predict the future is bound to get it wrong.