BusinessLIVE - For Your Ear

Following parliament’s standing committee on finance’s near rejection of the supplementary budget, finance minister Tito Mboweni wrote an oped extolling structural reforms as a cure for a moribund economy. His argument centred on three inter-meshed but analytically distinct issues. He reasoned that, with the current high debt levels, SA cannot spend its way to growth as fiscal multipli...

Rome — Stella Jean, the Haitian-Italian designer who has just announced a boycott of Milan Fashion Week, says she has suffered racism all her life. But it was only when she encountered it in Italy’s mainly white fashion industry that she realised just how unwilling people are to talk about it. Now Jean, whose brightly coloured skirts and dresses are worn by celebrities including Beyonc...

Ashland, Oregon — Arson investigators have opened a probe into the suspicious origins of a deadly Oregon wildfire that began in the town of Ashland and destroyed hundreds of homes in nearby communities, Ashland's police chief said on Thursday. The remains of two victims have been found in ruins from the blaze, which erupted on Tuesday and roared through a third day in the midst of a spate of...

Washington — US President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden will commemorate the 19th anniversary of the September 11 attacks on Friday, with both candidates separately visiting the rural Pennsylvania field where one of the hijacked planes crashed. Biden and his wife Jill will first attend a morning ceremony in lower Manhattan in New York, where al-Qaeda hijackers flew two air...

London — Oil prices fell for a second day and were on track for a second weekly fall after US stock markets tumbled and US stockpiles rose unexpectedly. Brent was down 12c, or 0.3%, at $39.94 a barrel by 8.41am GMT, after falling nearly 2% on Thursday, while US crude dropped 3c, or 0.1%, to $37.27 a barrel, having fallen 2% in the previous session. Both benchmarks were 6% down for the week....

London/Tokyo — European shares struggled for momentum on Friday as doubts about extra monetary stimulus and overnight falls in US big tech shares kept investors on edge. Elevated fears over a messy hard Brexit added to the bearish sentiment, putting sterling on track for its worst week since March after the EU told Britain it should urgently scrap a plan to break their divorce treaty. In oth...

Kuala Lumpur/Beijing — Nervousness is mounting over whether top pork consumer China will halt imports of the meat from Europe’s biggest producer on concerns about a pig-killing disease. Germany, which counts on China as a key pork market, confirmed a case of African swine fever on Thursday. That’s already caused South Korea and Japan to suspend purchases, and Taiwan to begin insp...

For Emmanuel Macron, the moment of truth is approaching at a rate of knots. The French president has again fired off rhetorical broadsides at his Turkish counterpart over the crisis in the Eastern Mediterranean. But words are not going to break Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s bones, and Macron will struggle to build an international consensus to use the economic sticks, much less the military s...

Radically different opinions around the world on the safety, effectiveness and importance of vaccines highlight the challenge facing health officials once a Covid-19 shot arrives. In countries such as South Korea, Indonesia, Pakistan and Poland, confidence in vaccines has declined in recent years, according to a study published on Thursday in The Lancet medical journal. Although support for inocul...

Graeme Körner from Körner Perspective ( GlaxoSmithKline as his stock pick of the day and Mia Kruger from Kruger Internationals ( chose Apple. Körner said: “I’m going for GlaxoSmithKline. I think it’s an amazing OTC [over the counter] portfolio and strong in vaccines. It also has a good pharma portfolio and I think it’s a well-run business.” Kruger sa...

President Donald Trump is reviving his 2016 campaign playbook on attacking China, but running as the incumbent means defending a record of only limited success in rewriting the economic relationship with Beijing. Much of what the Trump team has laid out in recent weeks sounds like campaign promises made four years ago: stopping outsourcing and bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US, ending dep...

Listen to the latest BusinessLIVE articles from the news desk of Business Day, Financial Mail and the Business Times. This audio is produced directly from the text article.

Listen to the latest BusinessLIVE articles from the news desk of Business Day, Financial Mail and the Business Times. This audio is produced directly from the text article.

It almost doesn’t matter who started the fires this week in the squalid refugee camp on Lesbos called Moria, leaving thousands to sleep on the streets. It could have been the desperate migrants, dwelling in cramped tents without clean toilets and forced by Covid-19 to “quarantine,” whatever that may mean in such conditions. It could have been local Greeks, who resent what they se...

Gold prices fell on Friday as the US dollar rebounded, but was on track for a weekly gain underpinned by worries over a global economic recovery from the coronavirus-led slump. Spot gold was down 0.8% at $1,938.53/oz at 3.08am GMT, after hitting its best level since September 2 at $1,965.94/oz on Thursday. Gold has gained 0.4% this week. US gold futures fell 0.8% to $1,948/oz. “A rebound in...

Tokyo — Asian shares struggled to stem a bearish mood on Friday after US big tech firm shares fell again overnight on growing doubts about US stimulus and worries about their stretched valuations. MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan dipped 0.2%, hovering just above a one-month trough touched earlier this week. Japan’s Nikkei rose 0.3%. Souring the mood, the...

Number of Covid-19 infections in SA rises to 644,438, there have been 573,003 recoveries and 15,265 deaths to date

Tokyo — Oil prices fell for a second day on Friday, pressured by a surprise rise in US stockpiles as the coronavirus pandemic continues to erode demand for fuels. Brent crude was down 18c, or 0.5%, at $39.88 a barrel by 3.37am GMT, after falling nearly 2% on Thursday, while US crude dropped 14c, or 0.4%, to $37.16 a barrel, having fallen 2% in the previous session. Both major benchmarks are...

The JSE faces mixed Asian markets on Friday morning, with trade in US markets volatile overnight as tech stocks continue to be sold off. Tech stocks have fared well so far in 2020, and have been under pressure in September, in what some analysts said was an inevitable correction. What the European Central Bank (ECB) on Thursday did was upbeat regarding the eurozone’s economic outlook, analys...

Berlin — African swine fever, a deadly pig disease, has materialised in Germany for the first time, threatening to hammer exports from Europe’s biggest pork-producing nation. A confirmed case of African swine fever has been identified in the eastern state of Brandenburg, agriculture minister Julia Kloeckner said on Thursday at a briefing in Berlin. The virus, which kills most infected...

New York — US stocks closed lower after a choppy trading session on Thursday as heavyweight tech-related stocks resumed their decline after a sharp rebound the previous session, while elevated jobless claims reminded investors of a difficult recovery ahead. Names that have rallied since March lows, such as Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.com, all fell. Tesla rose slightly, initially helping to l...

With the government facing a budget shortfall of R1.1-trillion an tax collections 20% lower than last year, you’d think it would be happy for whatever extra revenue it could get. At the annual Tax Indaba this week, Keith Engel, the CEO of the SA Institute of Tax Professionals, spoke of the contribution which transactional taxes could make to close the gap. As it turns out, there is quite a b...

Washington — The Treasury department sanctioned Andrii Derkach, a member of the Ukrainian parliament who met with Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, in 2019, alleging he is a Russian agent trying to influence the 2020 US presidential election. Between May and July of 2020, Derkach released edited audio tapes and other unsupported information with the intent to dis...

US President Donald Trump has never been one to let the truth get in the way of his personal ambition. So, faced with the very real risk of being a one-term president, it’s unsurprising that he’d try pin his political salvation on a coronavirus vaccine — or, at least, on the promise of one. “You could have a very big surprise coming up ... The people of the world will be ha...

A round-up of the best pictures from day 168 of the national lockdown