|
Wednesday 01st of February 2017 |
Morning Africa |
Register and its all Free.
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
Macro Thoughts |
read more |
|
The oldest known human ancestor @bbcworldservice Audio Africa |
Scientists believe they've found what could be the earliest ancestor or humans and a range of other species. It comes in the form of a microscopic creature which lived over 500 million years ago in what is today China. Professor Simon Conway Morris from St Johns College Cambridge was part of the research team.
|
read more |
|
The best blinged-out watches from 2017 so far Africa |
Cartier Panthère Royale.Source: Cartier
As much as I loved the Cartier Panthère with the black spots that I mentioned in our last roundup, this one is much more blinged-out. In white gold with diamonds across every centimeter, this delicate filagreed watch was one of the most beautiful at SIHH
|
read more |
|
This is the one thing Donald Trump, Syria's Bashar al-Assad and President al-Sisi in Egypt have in common Crowds matter. Law & Politics |
We reporters love crowd figures. The bigger the mob, the better the story. Politicians love them too. The greater the masses, the greater the popularity. Ask not who said: “I’m like, wait a minute. I made a speech. I looked out, the field was, it looked like a million, million and a half people.” Ah, those millions.
Back in 2011, the crowds in Tahrir Square were in their hundreds of thousands. A million Egyptians – that's the figure Al Jazeera went for. Or maybe it was a million and a half people in central Cairo. They helped to overthrow Hosni Mubarak – with the help of the army, of course, the people’s protector. Experts thought 300,000 was the greatest number of Egyptians you could cram into the Tahrir district. But what the hell? It was a revolution.
So Mohamed Morsi won the first democratic election in modern Egyptian history, but two years later the crowds were back in the streets of the Arab world’s most populated nation. Now they wanted the overthrow of Morsi and the strong hand of the people’s protector, the army. They produced a reported 22 million signatures on a youth movement protest petition. And they got General, later Field Marshal, later still President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. His publicists then announced that his coup d'état had been supported by protestors who took part in “the largest demonstrations in human history”. They touted the total cross-country crowds as 33 million, more than a third of the entire Egyptian population. This was fantastical, but obsessive.
No wonder that when Donald Trump met Sisi last year, he pronounced the Egyptian leader “a fantastic guy”. And let’s not forget that Obama’s administration went along with the utterly unverified signatures on that infamous ‘petition’. Hillary Clinton’s own State Department declared that the US could not reverse the will of the “22 million people who spoke out [sic] and had their voices heard”. But it was the scale of the 33 millions that the military used to claim legitimacy. When the BBC reported this Hollywood-style exaggeration, Sisi’s acolytes requoted the BBC as authenticating the fantasy.
But you could see what Trump’s weird spokesman meant when he said that this was “the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration”. Whatever the final results of the US election that gave his master victory, Sean Spicer was untruthfully saying what his master truthfully wanted to hear: that the will of the people must be done. Crowds matter. When the Egyptian army staged its coup, Sisi’s friend Blair did actually say that it had done so at “the will of the people”.
Maybe crowd figures are taking the place of public opinion polls – which long ago took the place of elections in popular imagination – and that the magic million (or million and a half) is the new obsession of American presidents as it has been the obsession of Arab presidents for years. Zoom in on Trump. But let’s not get obsessive about him. All he was saying is that he had seen “an awesome manifestation of people power”
|
read more |
|
17-SEP-2012 ::The Madding Crowd Law & Politics |
Now set these events alongside these comments from the US army war college quarterly 1997. The US officer assigned to the deputy chief of staff (Intelligence), charged with defining the future of warfare, wrote "One of the defining bifurcations of the future will be the conflict between information masters and information victims."
This information warfare will not be couched in the rationale of geopolitics, the author suggests, but will be "spawned" - like any Hollywood drama - out of raw emotions. "Hatred, jealousy, and greed - emotions, rather than strategy - will set the terms of [information warfare] struggles".
Now what are the consequences of this new 21st century madding crowd? A madding crowd which can be inflamed by a fellow with a camera and an account with YouTube.
There are plenty of flame throwers in a population of seven billion.
|
read more |
|
If Trump hasn't yet seized the modern-day equivalents of the telephone and the telegraph, he has certainly managed to scramble their signals. Quartz Law & Politics |
The key to a successful insurrection, Vladimir Lenin wrote three days before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, was the seizure of the telephone and telegraph. Every Soviet child, including myself, learned this dictum in the fourth grade. In the 21st century, I never thought I’d have reason to reflect on Lenin’s advice again. The Soviet Union is long gone; I now live in the US. Then, in the first month of the centennial anniversary of the Russian Revolution, Americans inaugurated Donald Trump as their 45th president. This is a man who, in alliance with most radical elements of the Republican Party, has flooded the country’s media channels with fake news and conspiracy theories. If Trump hasn’t yet seized the modern-day equivalents of the telephone and the telegraph, he has certainly managed to scramble their signals. Does Trump’s victory and his cabinet appointments genuinely amount to a government takeover akin to the one staged by the Bolshevik Party in 1917? If we view Trump’s “movement” as a radical faction within the Republican Party that has swept him to power despite opposition from within the party, the comparison is not as far-fetched as it may seem. The disturbing parallels between Lenin and Trump include the role that foreign interference appears to have played in their rise to power. Although never definitively proven, Lenin’s rapid assent to power has long been credited to the complicity of Germany, which had a vital interest in destabilizing Russia, their key adversary in World War I. An exile in Switzerland up until April 1917, Lenin and his comrades had been allowed to pass through German lands in a special “sealed train” and eventually reach Petrograd. There, he joined other Bolsheviks to plot the second—proletarian—revolution. According to many prominent historians, Germans also provided significant funding for Pravda, the newspaper that spread the Bolsheviks’ propaganda. One hundred years later in the US, American intelligence agencies and bipartisan members of Congress have come to a consensus that the revanchist and anti-democratic government of Russia meddled in the 2016 US election, using cyber warfare to tip the scales toward the pro-Putin candidate. What seemed unimaginable just a few months ago—lifting Western sanctions imposed on Russia for its annexation of Crimea—is now possible. In the post-industrial world, totalitarianism, too, can become global.
|
read more |
|
Trump trade adviser says Germany using "grossly undervalued" euro International Trade |
Peter Navarro, the head of the U.S. president's new National Trade Council, told the Financial Times the euro was like an "implicit Deutsche Mark" whose low valuation gave Germany an edge over the United States and its European Union partners.
Navarro's comments are the latest from Washington that may deepen growing unease over the outlook for global trade, after Trump himself told the Wall Street Journal two weeks ago that the dollar's strength against the Chinese yuan "is killing us".
The euro rose sharply to an eight-week high against the dollar of $1.08, further away from the 14-year low of $1.0339 it hit earlier this month. It had fallen almost 25 percent over the previous three years.
|
read more |
|
The Western Indian Ocean's blue economy can thrive. Here's how Africa |
Few readers will have heard the term “Western Indian Ocean”. Yet, this 30 million square km of ocean off the coasts of ten east and southern African countries supports some 60 million people living within 100km of the shore.
The annual economic output of the ocean is estimated to come fourth in line behind the region’s biggest economies – South Africa, Kenya and Tanzania. It produces more than $20.8 billion in goods and services every year.
But the health of the ocean is approaching a turning point. Many principal ocean assets are declining as a result of exploitation. And this is happening at a time when the use of ocean resources to support growth is accelerating.
So a key question is: can the ocean economy in the Western Indian Ocean grow and support those countries’ aspirations in coming decades?
Remarkable and sobering findings, and possible answers, are contained in a new report. It was led by the World Wildlife Fund, the Boston Consulting Group and CORDIO (Coastal Oceans Research and Development in the Indian Ocean East Africa) East Africa.
The economic analysis focused on ocean goods and services that were based on living marine ecosystems. It didn’t include activities like shipping and mining that don’t depend on ecological functions of the sea. The researchers found the region’s total ocean asset base, a sort of “shared wealth fund”, was at least $333.8 billion.
The main assets include fisheries, the coastline itself, mangroves, carbon absorption, seagrass beds and corals reefs. The most productive benefits annually are from coastal and marine tourism, carbon sequestration and fisheries.
But the health of the assets that provide these benefits is in jeopardy. The report documents that 35% of the fish stocks assessed in the Western Indian Ocean are fully exploited and 28% are over-exploited. Over the course of 25 years, both Tanzania and Kenya lost 18% of their mangroves. Over 50% of the shark species assessed in the region are considered threatened. And 71-100% of the region’s coral reefs are at risk, with the exception of those in the Seychelles.
|
read more |
|
Ghanaians Hoarding Dollars Put Cedi on Course for 19-Month Low Bloomberg Africa |
The cedi was among the worst performers in the world this year after data showed the nation’s budget shortfall in the first 11 months of 2016 was more than 2 percentage points higher than the government’s target. The cedi declined 0.7 percent to 4.3775 per dollar as of 11:41 a.m. in London.
Provisional data from the Bank of Ghana for the fiscal period from January through November showed a shortfall of 7 percent of gross domestic product, exceeding the target of 4.7 percent because of weak revenue collection. Concerns over the currency, which has lost about a fourth of its value in two years, were further exacerbated by the central bank’s surprise decision to keep a key interest rate unchanged this month.
The administration under President Nana Akufo-Addo, who took office earlier this month, will present the government’s budget in March.
“People are keeping what they have, until the first budget is read,” Hamza Adam, the head of treasury at Universal Merchant Bank in Accra, said by phone. “The central bank decided to maintain the policy rate because of inflationary pressures. Combined with the fact that people are not sure about what the budget-deficit target would be, many are just cautious.”
Conclusions
BUY The CEDI.
President @NAkufoAddo I am sure will err on the side of Fiscal rectitude
|
read more |
|
African economies are in an "age of uncertainties" @NjorogeP Kenyan Economy |
While Kenya has sufficient buffers, including a $1.5 billion standby loan facility with the International Monetary Fund to cushion its economy in times of externally induced shocks, there isn’t adequate insurance against a “Trump effect,” Njoroge said, referring to U.S. President Donald Trump’s inclination towards protectionist trade policy and his stance on immigration.
“There could be some headwinds; the most significant ones still remain the external environment,” Njoroge said. “We don’t have adequate insurance for them.”
African economies are in an “age of uncertainties” in which most nations and investors targeting emerging markets are waiting with “bated breath” for U.S. policy, Njoroge said.
Kenya is worried that Trump may suddenly cancel a 16-year-old trade pact known as the African Growth and Opportunity Act, or AGOA. The treaty enacted in 2000 allows dozens of sub-Saharan African countries to export certain goods to the U.S. duty-free. It expires in 2025.
“What would happen if suddenly somebody blows out AGOA or there is a slowdown in remittances,” he said. “The concern is not for just Kenya alone, the concern is worldwide.”
Remittances are the biggest source of foreign currency for the $69.2 billion economy, followed by agricultural exports such as cut flowers and black tea.
|
read more |
|
|
|
|