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/ 9 February 2009
There was a time in the development of the present monetary system when you’d not accept a coin without biting it to check its authenticity.
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/ 19 January 2009
On a recent cycling trip Kevin Davie met up with
tiny, unexpected tourists from Siberia.
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/ 30 November 2008
We are in a new era of state capitalism where the regulator is also the investor, writes Kevin Davie.
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/ 25 November 2008
Could it be though, that the G20 has not risen to the challenge because it has misdiagnosed the problem?
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/ 20 November 2008
Were triple-digit oil prices to blame for the market crisis and what are the prospects for future oil prices? Kevin Davie reports.
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/ 8 November 2008
Look back at the polls just two months ago and you will see that John McCain was nipping at Barack Obama’s heels in the race to the White House.
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/ 3 November 2008
With the United States election just around the corner, who’d want to be in the shoes of either front-runner Barack Obama or John McCain?
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/ 24 October 2008
Kevin Davie goes in search of Bushmen paintings in the Eastern Cape and wonders what happened to the people who made them.
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/ 19 October 2008
Our government would have taken stakes in the Big Four, say to the tune of R120-billion or so. Now this would be a debate to have locally.
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/ 13 October 2008
Markets internationally have been poisoned. But who is responsible?
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/ 8 September 2008
Tito Mboweni was in the news this week because he was quitting to go fishing. This seems to have changed after chatting to the ANC’s Gwede Mantashe.
When prices go up, in most cases consumption goes down, although there are some famous exceptions to this rule.
We do have the policies, reports Kevin Davie, but there doesn’t seem to be an implementation plan.
The US election is just a few months off, but SA’s, in April, is also just around the corner.The difference, though, couldn’t be more glaring.
The prediction market is said to be more accurate than opinion polls. Kevin Davie investigates.
If you’re planning to raise a second bond to buy your next tank of fuel, you will not be overjoyed to know that coal-to-liquid giant Sasol is making over R100-million a day in profit. An industry analyst familiar with Sasol’s cost structure says that the company, because its assets are largely depreciated, has low running costs. He calculates these, including the cost of coal, at $35 a barrel.
Kevin Davie recalls the warm hospitality of the people of Lesotho and the variable weather conditions in which they live. The village of Ha Sepechela is pretty remote, comprising about 30 chimneyless huts. Here residents leave the top half of their stable-type doors open to allow smoke to escape.
If all the oil the world ever had could be shown on a dashboard fuel gauge, where would the needle be pointing now? Peak oil pundits, who have long said that the world will in time run out of oil, would answer "halfway". This school of thought has enjoyed only fringe status until recently, but is now fast moving to the mainstream as crude oil prices continue to break new records.
Benny Mokaba, an executive director at Sasol is, among others things, the company’s Mafutha champion.This is the Sasol 4 project, an 80 000 barrel-a-day coal-to-liquid (CTL) plant to be built either in Limpopo or the Free State. Mokaba is the kind of guy any shareholder would want to have championing his or her company.
There should be a simple enough formula that could marry our abundance of sun with the mountain of loot Trevor Manuel is sitting on, to fix the electricity crisis, quick sticks.The latest treasury figures show that the budget surplus this year will be R18,5-billion.
A couple of months back, driving past one of those service stations that advertises its prices on a large board on the street, I noticed that diesel was quite a bit more expensive than petrol. I thought that whoever had the job of putting up the prices had got the two mixed up, writes Kevin Davie.
When business schools look for case material in object lessons on how not to run an enterprise, Eskom has no peer and no precedent in South Africa. Its January wipeout where it shut down the mines and hobbled the country’s growth prospects, is breathtaking in both its scale and impact.
If you’re worried about rocketing petrol prices — which hit R8,25 a litre in Gauteng last week and are set to increase further — you can take some comfort from the fact that reform of the fuel sector is finally under way, with the promise of a freer, more efficient fuel market kicking in early next year.
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/ 25 February 2008
Shortly after Australian Mark Cutifani arrived at AngloGold Ashanti, he was forced to wear a Springbok rugby jersey for two days as his colleagues celebrated the Boks’ World Cup victory. Cutifani describes the event as “an absolute tragedy”, but despite this trauma, he appears relaxed and smiling when we meet at the mining house’s head offices in the refurbished Turbine Hall in downtown Johannesburg.
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/ 15 February 2008
As with other electricity users in this country, I pay a levy on my usage to fund demand side management (DSM) programmes, intended to reduce overall Âelectricity consumption. I was keen to get some of this money back in the form of the new incentive or subsidy available via Eskom to promote the use of solar water heaters, writes Kevin Davie.
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/ 25 January 2008
South Africa has plenty of energy available. The problem is, we don’t have enough power. Some of the country’s biggest businesses have been queuing up to sell power to Eskom. The potential power on the table — all 5 000MW of it — is almost equivalent to two Koeberg-sized nuclear power stations.
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/ 11 January 2008
The significant other and I found ourselves owning two cars with a combined engine capacity of 7,2 litres. Bought before 2000 when oil was below $20 a barrel, these beasts were hardly fuel-efficient or modest about contributing to a warming planet. After some research we bought a 2,5-litre Subaru Forrester, but delayed selling one or both of the beasts as I probed our best option.
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/ 11 January 2008
The significant other and I found ourselves owning two cars with a combined engine capacity of 7,2 litres. Bought before 2000 when oil was below $20 a barrel, these beasts were hardly fuel-efficient or modest about contributing to a warming planet. After some research we bought a 2,5-litre Subaru Forrester, but delayed selling one or both of the beasts as I probed our best option.
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/ 18 December 2007
Home for Jon Adams is a Randburg suburb no different to hundreds of thousands of comfortable northern suburbs residents. There are even a couple of solar collectors on his roof that provide hot water for the house. But here the similarities stop, because the roof also has 36 solar panels each generating 80W peak power to provide electricity for his home.
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/ 27 November 2007
With oil nudging $100 a barrel this week, I did a set of test rides of vehicles that are so cheap to run you can travel 100km for as little as 40c. These vehicles — electric scooters or bikes — potentially solve two problems that characterise motorised travel in Johannesburg: rising energy costs and increasing gridlock.
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/ 12 November 2007
If there’s a vehicle that is red-hot in our globally warming world, it’s the plug-in hybrid. The best-known hybrid, Toyota’s Prius, is now 10 years old and has sold more than 800 000 units worldwide. It is available in South Africa, where about 20 vehicles are sold on average each month.
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/ 26 October 2007
The only green reference in the budget was Finance Minister Trevor Manuel bemoaning the fact that it did not contain a pro-environment stance. He indicated that he was looking for his colleagues in the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism to play the lead role and promised that the next Budget would include a green component.