South African rand flat with inflation the week's main focus
At 0740 GMT the rand traded at 17.7075 against the dollar , unchanged from Friday's close.
Statistics South Africa will release June inflation data on Wednesday, with analysts polled by Reuters expecting a modest rise to 3% year on year from 2.8% in May (ZACPIY=ECI), opens new tab.
"A softer print could open the door for one last rate cut this year, while a firmer number would push that possibility further out," said Andre Cilliers, currency strategist at TreasuryONE.
The South African Reserve Bank's next interest rate announcement is on July 31. The bank cut its repo rate by 25 basis points at its last meeting in May (ZAREPO=ECI), opens new tab, with inflation below its 3%-6% target range.
The Johannesburg Stock Exchange's Top-40 index (.JTOPI), opens new tab was up about 0.4% in early trade. The benchmark 2035 government bond was little changed in early deals, with the yield at 9.935%.
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BBC News
4 hours ago
- BBC News
Lagos go experience partial blackout for 25 days
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Telegraph
5 hours ago
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Britain cannot afford to keep Rachel Reeves any longer
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Telegraph
6 hours ago
- Telegraph
There's still one way that Britain can awaken from this nightmare
Sorry to keep banging on about how much worse things were in Britain in the 1970s. This must be like being lectured by your grandmother on how their generation survived the Blitz. But for those who lived through that pre-modern era when ordinary people were held hostage by titanic monopoly powers against which elected governments appeared to be helpless, it is difficult to see today's problems as the end of the world. It wasn't just the daily power outages which brought darkness and the shut down of all electrical equipment for hours at a time. There were as well the horrendous economic pressures which put today's difficulties into a sobering perspective. It may be true – as the young point out with some bitterness – that property was unbelievably cheap. At the end of the 1960s, it was possible to buy a suburban house in London for under £10,000. (TEN THOUSAND POUNDS.) 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The cost of their homes was suddenly way beyond the reach of their pay levels. The quality of life and the purchasing power of even well paid people, crashed with a suddenness that was deranging. It was now almost impossible for a mortgaged household to survive on one income so women had no choice but to go out to work. (Even though most mortgage lenders at the time would not take a wife's income into account which made practical planning problematic.) But it was not only the economics that was going badly wrong. The later 60s and the 70s produced some ugly social dynamics that are scarcely recalled now, perhaps because they are so shaming. There were menacing mobs of skinheads whose racism and anti-social delinquency were blatantly violent. My husband and I once stood over a pair of Asian boys on the tube to shield them from a pack of shaven headed thugs who were threatening to pull them off the train. Somehow London had gone from its world-conquering moment in the Swinging Sixties to this: rubbish piling up in the streets, endless transport strikes and a great many people deciding that it was time to leave the country forever. Those who lament today that 'nothing works' can scarcely imagine the havoc of unreliability that was everyday life in that chaotic decade. The antagonism toward the trade unions and the closed shop nationalised industries famously dominated the historic account of this awful period but what may be forgotten is the political despair that accompanied it. A succession of governments and party leaders had revealed themselves, to the disgust of the electorate, to be utterly useless. The 60s as we remember them had got under way with Harold Wilson who seemed to have achieved a fairly jolly accommodation with the most powerful trades unions. The 'beer and sandwiches at Number 10' technique of conciliation and kinship – which actually involved caving in to most union demands to avert strike action – seemed to offer some kind of sustainable mode of operation. Until it didn't. The unions would not be bought off indefinitely and their growing militancy was undermining major British industries like car manufacturing. The country then turned, more in desperation than hope, to the Conservatives under Edward Heath who promised legislation to curb the spread of disruptive union activism. When that proved an ineffectual disaster Harold Wilson was returned to power. He then retired from office (due sadly to the onset of dementia) and was followed by James Callaghan who had the misfortune to preside over the 1979 Winter of Discontent. The deterioration of confidence in the political leadership of the country, by this time, seemed irreversible. It was genuinely believed by a great many responsible people that national decline was not just inevitable but was already fully under way, and that this was attributable to the low standard of government performance: lack of conviction, failure of nerve and the poverty of ideas for dealing with the modern, post-imperial world. And what is more, this low standard was believed to be incurable. British politics was exhausted intellectually and morally. You know what happened next. The Callaghan government lost a vote of confidence in the House (dramatically by one vote). A general election followed which was won by Margaret Thatcher's new model Conservative party and – not overnight but over a period of several years – confidence was restored not just in the economic future but in the possibility of effective government. British politics was not dead after all: it had simply sunk into a defeatist depression. The Left which had been broken and demoralised first by its experience in government and then by the public renunciation of its trades union wing which had propelled the Thatcher Tories into power, now had to reinvent itself. First came the Social Democrats with their extreme Centrism, who were determined to 'break the mould' of party politics – which is to say, replace Labour and challenge the Tories' all out commitment to free markets. A lot of initial excitement was generated by this development, but it subsided into a footnote as the Thatcherite spirit of the 1980s swept it aside. Finally, Tony Blair's plagiarism of the Tory philosophy brought Labour back into the game. And so, confidence in recognisable party politics returned. What it took was nerve and fresh ideas. There must be a lesson there.
