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If you are tracking the NSE Do it via RICHLIVE and use Mozilla Firefox as your Browser. 0930-1500 KENYA TIME Normal Board - The Whole shebang Prompt Board Next day settlement Expert Board All you need re an Individual stock.
The Latest Daily PodCast can be found here on the Front Page of the site http://www.rich.co.ke |
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"There is a world inside the world." - Don DeLillo, Libra Africa |
“There is enough mystery in the facts as we know them, enough of conspiracy, coincidence, loose ends, dead ends, multiple interpretations. There is no need […] to invent the grand and masterful scheme, the plot that reaches flawlessly in a dozen directions. - Agent Branch (58)” ― Don DeLillo, Libra
“We lead more interesting lives than we think. We are characters in plots, without the compression and numinous sheen. Our lives, examined carefully in all their affinities and links, abound with suggestive meaning, with themes and involute turnings we have not allowed ourselves to see completely.” ― Don DeLillo, Libra
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Venezuela Plans Army Exercises as Maduro Seeks to Prolong Powers Law & Politics |
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced undefined “military exercises” for the embattled nation, just a day after pledging to prolong his government’s special emergency powers.
Speaking in Caracas’s Ibarra Square after a march Saturday by several hundred supporters, Maduro said his opponents are orchestrating foreign military intervention in Venezuela. Exercises by the army and militia groups would prepare “for any scenario,” Maduro said.
“The oligarchy’s plan is to disturb the peace so they can justify foreign intervention in Venezuela,” Maduro said in televised remarks at the rally. “I’m not an extremist for saying this, but they’re extremists for wanting to carry this out.”
Conclusions
Headed for an implosion.
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"The Obama administration is setting the stage for endless confrontation, and possibly even war, with Russia, and with no public debate." Law & Politics |
If “we continue to build up the eastern flank of NATO, with more battalions, more exercises, and more ships and more platforms,” he told an audience at the Atlantic Council, “the Russians will respond. I’m not sure where that takes you.”
Nobody knows where it takes us, and that’s the problem. It could take us all too easily from small provocations to a series of escalations by each side to show they mean business. And given the trip-wire effect of nuclear weapons stored on NATO’s soil, the danger of escalation to nuclear war is entirely real.
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Hybrid War Hyenas Tearing Brazil Apart Pepe Escobar Law & Politics |
This lowly farce should serve as a wake-up call not only to the BRICS but to the whole Global South. Who needs NATO, R2P (“responsibility to protect”) or “moderate rebels” when you can get your regime change just by tweaking a nation’s political/judicial system?
And that’s the beauty of a regime change-light/color revolution of Hybrid War when staged in such a dynamically creative nation such as Brazil. The hall of mirrors yields a political simulacrum that would have driven deconstructionists Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco, if alive, green with envy; a Congress crammed with fools/patsies/traitors/crooks, some of whom are already being investigated for corruption, has conspired to depose a president who is not under any formal corruption investigation – and has not committed any“crime of responsibility”.
Still, without a popular vote, the massively rejected tropical Brutus twins, Temer and Cunha, will find it impossible to govern, even though they would perfectly incarnate the project of the immensely arrogant and ignorant Brazilian elites; a neoliberal triumph, with Brazilian “democracy” trampled down six feet under.
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Currency Markets at a Glance WSJ World Currencies |
Euro 1.1315 Dollar Index 94.48 edged down 0.1 percent to 94.450 .DXY, inching away from a three-week high of 94.845 hit on Friday. Japan Yen 109.22 Swiss Franc 0.9784 Pound 1.4473 The British pound added 0.7 percent to $1.4488 GBP=D4 after dropping to a three-week low of $1.4333 in the previous session ahead of Britain's June 23 referendum Aussie 0.7344 Minutes of the Reserve Bank of Australia's (RBA) May policy meeting, at which policymakers reduced the cash rate by a quarter point to a record low 1.75 percent, were less dovish than some had anticipated. The Aussie was up 0.8 percent at $0.7349 AUD=D4 after rising as high as $0.7368, pulling decisively away from a two-and-a-half month low of $0.7236 plumbed in the previous session. India Rupee 66.685 South Korea Won 1173.88 Brazil Real 3.4987 Egypt Pound 8.8794 South Africa Rand 15.5852
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Gaddafi's Body in a Freezer - What's the Message? 24th October 2011 @TheStarKenya Africa |
I am left thinking, this dead Gaddafi business is one powerful message. And today Marshall McLuhan’s prediction in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) that ‘The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village’ has come to pass. The image of a bloodied Gaddafi, then of a dead Gaddafi in a meat locker have flashed around the world via the mobile, YouTube and Twitter.
Who is in charge of the messaging? Through the fog of real time and raw footage, I note a very powerful message. The essence of that message being;
‘Don’t Fxxk with us! Be- cause you will end up dead and a trophy souvenir in a fridge.’
That same person is probably repeating Muammar’s comment, “I tell the coward crusaders: I live in a place where you can’t get me. I live in the hearts of millions.”
And asking ‘Really? Are You? Or are you now very dead and in a meat locker?’
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Senegal intends raising $500 million to $1 billion through the sale of a Eurobond, sukuk or Samurai bonds, @macky_sall said in a May 13 interview in Kigali Africa |
The economy is expected to expand 6.6 percent this year, the most in sub-Saharan Africa after Ivory Coast and Tanzania, the International Monetary Fund said last month. Growth has averaged 4.7 percent since Sall, 54, a geological engineer, wrested the presidency from Abdoulaye Wade in 2012 elections
Peanut production reached a record 1.1 million metric tons last year and may be even higher this year if good rains materialize as expected, the president said. Rice output has doubled to 900,000 tons since 2012 and Sall is targeting 1.7 million tons by 2017, which would make the country self-sufficient as it strives to be less exposed to international market prices. Senegal also produces corn and millet.
Senegal’s dollar-denominated bonds have returned 8.2 percent this year., compared with an average of 7.6 percent for 17 sub-Saharan African securities. Yields on the $500 million of debt due in July 2024 rose 2 basis points to 7.1 percent on Monday.
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"The Revolutionary contingent attains its ideal form not in the place of production, but in the street" Africa |
“The revolutionary contingent attains its ideal form not in the place of production, but in the street, where for a moment it stops being a cog in the technical machine and itself becomes a motor (machine of attack), in other words a producer of speed.’’
As we look around the world today, we can see a battle for the ‘street’ from the streets of Bujumbura to the streets of Baltimore. In November last year, I wrote about Ouagadougou’s signal to sub-Saharan Africa and concluded that: We need to ask ourselves how many people can incumbent shoot stone cold dead in such a situation – 100, 1000, 10000?
This is another point: there is a threshold beyond which the incumbent cannot go. Where that threshold lies will be discov- ered in the throes of the even
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Zuma Factor Stynies Gordhan's Bid to Rescue South Africa Economy @business Africa |
South African Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan’s efforts to restore investor confidence in Africa’s most-industrialized economy and ward off a junk credit rating are being frustrated by the very man who appointed him to his post.
President Jacob Zuma has spent the past five months lurching from one scandal to the next and has repeatedly undermined Gordhan’s authority. According to the Sunday Times newspaper, Gordhan is now at risk of being charged with espionage, and fired -- speculation that drove the rand to a two-month low despite a denial by the presidency
Zuma’s actions have repeatedly damaged the economy. In December, he named little-known lawmaker David van Rooyen as finance minister, sending the rand and the nation’s bonds into a nosedive before reappointing Gordhan to a post he held from 2009 to 2014. He backtracked only after coming under pressure from business leaders and senior ruling party officials. The central bank has cut its forecast for economic expansion this year to 0.8 percent, predicting the slowest growth since a recession in 2009.
“There’s a huge amount of respect for Pravin,” Barton said in an interview in Kigali. “South Africa isn’t on a good path, there’s no question about that.”
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Naira forwards surged by the most on record @business Africa |
Three-month naira non-deliverable forwards rose by 14 percent, the most on a closing basis since the contracts began trading in March 2011, to a record 267 against the dollar at 4:06 p.m. in London. One-month forwards jumped 11 percent to 238, bringing their implied yield -- the annualized amount that investors would get if they bought the contract and there was no change in the spot price at the end of the period -- to 217 percent, also a record. Contracts maturing in a year climbed 5.7 percent to 314, suggesting a 58 percent drop in the naira from the interbank rate of 199.05 per dollar.
While Nigeria has held the naira at 197-199 since March 2015, even as falling oil prices cause government revenue and export earnings to plunge, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo announced a review of the currency regime on May 11 that “may feature” a devaluation. That was a shift from recent comments by President Muhammadu Buhari and came on the same day the government allowed fuel importers to buy foreign-exchange on the black market, rather than just from the central bank and oil companies. The unofficial rate weakened to about 360 to the dollar on Monday from 320 a week ago.
The move to allow fuel retailers access to the unofficial currency market “signals greater FX flexibility,” JF Ruhashyankiko, a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. economist in London, said in an e-mailed note. “This move is likely to lead to a restoration of partially allotted multiple exchange rates, but it is less clear whether it will also lead to a gradual lifting of capital controls. The only way to resume capital inflows is to lift the capital controls.”
Nigeria All Share Bloomberg -6.35% 2016 [4 month closing High] http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/NGSEINDX:IND
26,824.35 +383.32 +1.45%
Ghana Stock Exchange Composite Index Bloomberg -10.59% 2016 [3 Year Closing Low] http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/GGSECI:IND
CCTV Africa Mozambique's President due to meet President Xi Jinping of China https://twitter.com/cctvnewsafrica/status/732142714406481920
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Fintech takes off in Africa as lenders tap mobile technology @FT Kenyan Economy |
Finca, a US microfinance organisation, and First Access, a New York-based data analytics company, have formed a partnership to start making loans over east Africa using credit scores derived from mobile phone data.
This kind of uncollateralised lending has already started to transform Kenya’s micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) sector. Hundreds of thousands of loans worth more than $150m have been issued since March 2015 when Kenya Commercial Bank, the country’s largest bank, and M-Pesa, the mobile money platform of Safaricom, the dominant telecoms company, began collaborating.
The vast majority of borrowers were previously considered uncreditworthy because of their lack of credit history and access to financial services. However, KCB-Mpesa accepts about 80 per cent of applicants, with an average loan size of Ks4,000 ($40) and a default rate of just under 2 per cent.
“It’s much more efficient and accurate than the old system and we’re seeing much earlier repayments,” said Joshua Oigara, KCB chief executive.
Growth is proving exponential. “Every second a new loan is issued, and we’re only a year into this service,” said Bob Collymore, chief executive of Safaricom.
Shivani Siroya, chief executive of InVenture, a US start-up that launched its Mkopo Rahisi loan service via an Android app in March 2014, said it took 20 seconds to scan someone’s phone and determine whether they were creditworthy.
Like the other providers, InVenture is using increasingly detailed data to make credit decisions. For example, the Santa Monica-based company found that if at least 40 per cent of an applicant’s contacts were organised with both first and second names they were 16 times more likely to repay on time.
“Those indicators are just about invisible to the financial sector and the market place,” Ms Siroya said. “Now we’re bringing this data to life. These people are becoming creditworthy. Our goal is to change the perception of risk and level the playing field.”
The demand is huge. In 2013 the International Finance Corporation, a branch of the World Bank Group, estimated that MSMEs in developing countries face a financing gap of up to $2.6tn and that more than 200m formal and informal enterprises do not have a loan or overdraft but are in need of one.
Mobile phone-based lending is likely to expand along with soaring smartphone use.
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Kenyan Yields Slip Below Nigeria's Fortunes Diverge: Chart @business Kenyan Economy |
Kenya’s average local bond yields have fallen below Nigeria’s for the first time since early October. Kenyan shilling yields were 464 basis points higher than naira yields as recently as Nov. 11. Since then the fortunes of the two countries have shifted as Nigeria, Africa’s biggest economy, is battered by low oil prices and rising inflation, while investors are increasingly turning to Kenya, a net energy importer and more diversified economy.
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French retail giant Carrefour opens first store in Kenya today @BD_Africa Kenyan Economy |
“The supermarket space has been dominated by local indigenous players with some small exceptions. The arrival of Groupe Carrefour signals that this cosy market is set to come under pressure. Carrefour is surely targeting the top slice spend and in that regard I think they will be well received,” said the Rich Management CEO Aly Khan Satchu.
Kenya’s formal retail market is dominated by privately-held and family-owned businesses such as Nakumatt, Tuskys and Naivas with only one listed supermarket chain Uchumi.
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Kenya Mulls Scrapping Some Tea Taxes to Make Industry Profitable Kenyan Economy |
Kenya produced 399.2 million kilograms of tea in 2015 and earned 125.2 billion shillings ($1.24 billion) from exports to destinations such as Pakistan, Egypt and the U.K.
Large-scale producers are finding it more difficult to remain competitive because of expensive electricity and multiple taxation, the chief executive of the Kenya Tea Growers Association, Apollo Kiarie, said Monday.
“We either break even or change to a different crop,” he said.
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N.S.E Today |
Trading volumes have really thinned out over recent sessions. Total Turnover clocked 232.167m which is in line with the last few sessions but considerably below the weighted average for 2016. The Nairobi All Share retreated 1.00 point to close at 145.31. The NSE20 broke down through 3,900 and closed 40.12 points lower at 3866.97.
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N.S.E Equities - Commercial & Services |
Safaricom was the most actively traded share and ticked -1.15% easier off a 4 week High to close at 17.15 and traded 4.514m shares. Safaricom had to hurdle a Business Daily Front Page Story which questioned Safaricom's tendering processes. Supply remains thin and I expect the Price to head to 18.00.
WPP-ScanGroup also got a Shout-Out in the Business Daily Story and fell steeply -6.59% to close at a Fresh 2016 Low of 21.25. WPP-ScanGroup is -29.16% in 2016.
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N.S.E Equities - Finance & Investment |
COOP Bank closed unchanged at 18.45 and traded 2.811m shares worth 51.94m. COOP Bank is +2.5% in 2016 and was an Outlier in FY15 lifting FY Profit before tax +40.92% to 15.38302b. COOP will release Q1 Earnings Monday. Barclays Bank firmed +0.96% to close at 10.40 and traded 1.104m shares. Barclays has been caught in the Barclays Africa Group divestment cross-fire in 2016 and remains -23.52% Year to date. KCB eased -1.204% to close at 41.00 and traded 454,100 shares.
Liberty rebounded +3.46% to close at 14.95 and traded 5,400 shares.
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N.S.E Equities - Industrial & Allied |
KenGen fell 5.67% to close at 6.65 and just a whisker above the rights issue price of 6.55. KenGen has retreated -16.875% since announcing its Rights Issue Time-Table. The Down-Move is now plain exaggerated.
Carbacid rallied +6.00% to close at 15.90 and that marks a +9.655% surge this month. Carbacid has traded 2% of its issued shares this month. Carbacid is -2.45% Year to Date.
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