You're listening to Strictly Business Podcast with Lindsay Williams.
With me is Viv Govender from RAND Swiss and also David Shapiro from SAS for
Insecurities.
It's not the five o'clock shadow because of me, we missed out on that this week but
we're going to have a look at,
well obviously the tech sector but also some geopolitics as well.
And Viv one of the things that I've been speaking to David about in the couple of
times that I've spoken to him since we as a threesome
last spoke is his review of, not review of, look forward to 2026.
And one of the things he says, and he'll back me up on this, is that AI will still
be there,
will still be very prominent and an increasing part of our lives,
but the stocks may not be quite as ebullient as 2025.
Would you agree with that?
That is possible.
But I would, remember, I told you a while back that there's only two ways that AI
can really make
GDP growth needs to be around 5 percent to justify the spending that we are getting
at the moment.
And since we last spoke, what's happened is there is actually developments in that
front.
So we are seeing for the first time AI getting smart enough to do actual new
science.
So there's things called these Erdos problems and they're mathematical problems
and AI solving them on its own or just one of them on their own.
This is the kind of stuff that you expect to see before you know, things really
start taking off.
Because if we can do science like mathematics and so on, it can do science
like AI research.
And that is the point in which things become, you know, parabolic.
And so yes, it might slow down, you know, but if we do hit these technical limits
whenever they occur, maybe this year,
maybe in a decade's time, whatever happens at that point in time, you know, things
are gonna go crazy in a very, you know,
visible way.
Let me say that.
I think one of the reasons that people have kind of got a little bit like, you
know, less impressed by AI recently is because you got too smart.
People don't understand how good it is.
You need to be one of the world's best scientists to actually use the AI you can
get from like
Gemini or from, you know, open AI at the moment to its fullest ability.
Most people are literally not smart enough to actually use these programs to what
they can do at the moment.
Speaking of not smart enough, and that's me, not you, David,
but does that convince you to almost mentally rewrite your 2026 scenario?
No, you know, I called it the year of AI adoption.
And what Viv's saying, look, I can't talk at that high level.
But what I do know is that a lot of companies have held back from introducing
it into their
operations.
And my view is no, you can't, you're just not smart enough, you just don't
understand it.
And therefore, if I take it at a low level to Accenture, to ServiceNow, to...
companies, Salesforce, businesses like that, Adobe and that, which have been
ignored and where people are saying, no,
you don't need those companies.
It's, you know, you can do it yourself.
Forget it.
You know, forget it.
And I think you're going to need a lot of high level people to to actually get the
best out of it for
you.
So coming from a different angle, from a very much lower level, I still think that,
you know,
they're businesses who understand it.
are going to be needed in order to get the best out of it.
Okay, let me look at it from a different angle.
And I just want to go to Viv on this one before we come back to you on a couple of
specific stocks examples, David.
But Viv, what particular sectors do you think lend themselves to the sort of AI
development that you're seeing at the moment?
I mean, is it the healthcare sector?
Is it aviation?
Is it retail?
What do you think is the one that could really bolt itself onto AI?
Yeah.
Look, I think the healthcare sector is one of those things that basically it's not
being held by the tech.
It's been held by either, I would say, inertia in the sector, regulations and
other factors.
Because at the moment, you can go and use your Gemini.
It'll give you a better result than most doctors you talk to.
At the moment, the average doctor is not as good as Gemini or Chakraborty.
That's just a fact, right?
I can attest to that, by the way, but that's another story.
Everyone, I had a health issue.
You had a health issue.
in the last little while and we've, and in both those cases, right?
You know, and this mine was like a year ago, but you know, it's gotten better
since then.
These things are as good as your doctor, you know, at least, and they have better
than the doctor because you can talk to that like 10
o'clock at night if you wanted to just to go through like thoughts that you might
have about, you know, test results or whatever.
That's already here.
Okay, so healthcare is salt.
When it comes to aviation, if you can basically navigate a
uh it's called a uh a busy city streets with pedestrians and whatnot you could fly
a plane there's nothing out of the air update what i mean uh
there's all these things that are already at a point where the technology is come to
a point where it can be adopted it's inertia it has the industry
as well as regulations that hold things back but speaking of what i was talking
about i don't know if this year the market will go up or not on the ai
I'm just saying that we are approaching a point where if the spark takes off,
whenever it does take off,
you won't see like five or six years time period for it to really go off.
It'll happen in a year because AI is the only technology in the world that adopts
itself.
So if you have AI that's smart enough, you don't need somebody to adopt it for you.
You don't need to have a smart guy coming and telling you what to do in order to get
into your company.
The AI could do it for itself.
It's almost like self-extracting, if you know what I mean.
when that does occur and like i said i don't know if it's this year or 10 years
time but we are kind of seeing the slight sparks right now that this
this thing is getting smart enough to do these kind of things at some potential
time in the future david this utopian world that has just been described
by viv govinda you're
an artistic person you're a great artist and a very very accomplished writer i must
say
is it all over for people like you is it over for me not at all Not at all.
I think that from that point of view, it's helping me enormously,
absolutely enormously, you know, to craft something easier.
And, you know, when I'm looking for I will write a paragraph or two paragraphs or
something and I'll say this just
doesn't gel.
And I go into AI and it corrects it for me and, you know, just makes it like having
an editor.
And the editors there, I mean, nobody writes a book.
Everybody in their book, they always thank the editors.
Simply, we can't write like that.
We haven't got the same kind of skills.
But I think where it also helps me is sometimes in humor.
You know, it's like here's 10 jokes or 10 statements.
I say, oh, this is good.
You know, but I do adapt it.
You've got to adapt it.
You know, you, but I mean, it's like having a good friend.
So if anything, it's helped It hasn't changed your style,
has it?
Not at all.
No?
No, not at all.
In fact, it's enhanced to a large extent.
The art side is difficult.
You know, I don't like AI-generated stuff, not at all.
You know, I don't think they can come close to proper art as somebody who sits
there with
an easel or something.
You know, it becomes very flat sometimes.
And especially the kind of stuff I do, which is painstakingly elaborate, you
know, kind of,
I mean, etching, I mean, stroke by stroke.
So it can't really help me unless I want to construct, say, listen,
give me a picture of this that I can copy it or blend it in or use it as a
reference.
But from a writing point of view, unbelievable.
Really?
I'm still not convinced, but yes, I can understand if you're disciplined and not
lazy.
And I know you're not.
You enjoy your writing.
So you're not going to say, right, write this for me because I want to watch a
football match or something and I need to get it out for tomorrow.
You're not going to do that.
I know.
Viv, a stock that came up earlier this week, in fact,
it was yesterday that David's been banging on about correctly for so long now and
successfully for so long now is
ASML.
which is TSMC.
If you look at those two companies, they epitomize AI investing, don't they?
Yes, and I own both of them.
And for the longest time, ASMR was, I was completely, I did not understand why this
company was not more valuable.
It just made no sense to me.
It is literally the irreplaceable company in the world.
There is nothing on the planet that comes close to what ASMR can do.
And it's foundational to this whole kind of technological craze we are seeing right
now.
And yet it's the cheapest company.
It's the same price, in fact, might be cheaper right now than OpenAI is.
And OpenAI has all these competitors.
ASML on the other hand has no competitors.
The entire Chinese economy cannot do what ASML does.
And so for the first time that we are seeing it as it is breaking the half a
trillion dollar mark,
it was quite pleasant because I've owned it for two years.
And you can see it hasn't really done that much until very recently.
They don't have as much as a boat, as ASML,
but they do have the execution ability that makes them almost unique in the
world.
It's a combination of the Taiwanese culture that makes people willing to go
with it, like whatever time to get things done.
Also, the fact that they're kind of isolated so you could have these super
genius
engineers being paid good but not incredible salaries that they'd get to the
U.S.
for other jobs, etc.
And so you have this combination, this kind of special perfect storm situation.
that allows you to produce the world's best chips using machines from ASML.
So both these companies are owned by me, and like I said, until very recently, ASML
has been quite disappointing, but really,
I think for the first time, people have very suddenly seen the true value coming
in here.
And just one thing I want to point out about these things: when people talk about
these two nanometer chips that these guys are making,
do you know what two nanometers means?
No, not actually.
Two nanometers is about 10 atoms.
Think about it.
When they say two nanometer chips, we're talking about 10 atoms wide.
That's what we're talking about.
Okay?
We're talking x-rays being basically used to etch these things, not like normal
light lasers,
x-ray lasers effectively in your mind.
That's the kind of technology we're talking about and ASML is the only one in
the world that can do this.
It's an incredible company.
Surely though.
given what you've been talking about over the last seven and a half minutes,
someone's going to replicate this though, Viv.
And then I'll come to you, David.
I mean, someone, of course, by the, because of the nature of AI, someone will
come up with something and there will be a new company,
a new startup that will replicate the business that ASML is in.
Viv?
Okay.
Let me explain to you what the technology looks like.
First of all, what ASML does is the most complicated, how, high-end science, or
engineering rather,
that humans have ever done.
There is no company in the world that comes close to what KSML does, in terms of
that kind of thing.
When you're basically using X-rays, you can't use lenses to focus these things.
What you are using is levels of little sheets of metal that reflect the X-rays in
like interference patterns that
actually edge onto the chip.
Think about that.
But here's the thing.
The Chinese have been trying to do this.
They know it's the company that they have to replace.
China has been trying for over a decade to get ASML, to do what ASML is doing.
This is the world's largest manufacturing entity.
This is China as a whole.
And they've been trying.
They have not done it yet.
It's not because they have some patents that the Chinese are expecting beyond
anything else.
It's not because they have some legal protection.
It's just because the actual technical skill required to do this is their moat.
And you can't go and just replicate this technical skill out of nowhere.
It is an incredibly how can I say?
An incredible achievement for you Dutch, I can say that to Lindsay.
That you have created a company that is just so good that even the world's largest
manufacturing country, China,
cannot do what you do.
Okay David now the human factor comes in.
Someone's landing at this moment at Schiphol Airport Amsterdam and they're
going to get on the train to Eindhoven and they're going to knock on the door and
say Mr ASML let's go and have a cup of coffee and they're going to nick a couple
of those ASML people surely
after what Viv just described, somebody might be tempted.
Why not?
I'm sure they've been trying to do this, but I mean, I don't think it's one
particular scientist.
This has been developed over a long time.
And in fact, if you go into the history of ASML, which I think came out of Philips,
its early stages,
its early life was very dramatic.
It didn't make profits.
It was battling along.
So to get to where they've got today,
took a huge amount of effort and pain and suffering so it's a wonderful story and i
think it could
have only been um netherlands or the hollanders you know that could have done
something like that
doer but persistent and
uh no you you understand what i'm saying americans are too kind of you know all
over the place capricious phlegmatic whatever you
want to say It hasn't come overnight.
It's been a long battle, but I agree with Viv.
And you know that I've been saying this.
You know, I found the same thing and I used to drive me mad every time they
published results because they're not known for their
exuberance.
You know, their CEOs don't get up and put on leather jackets and put on a show like
Jensen Wang or someone like that or the Apple boys.
You know, they just get on with it.
give you a very matter of effect where they are and what they're doing.
But they would quietly say, we're going to grow 30% per year and we've got good
demand.
They would say it in the low tide.
And no one believed them, you know.
And I agree with Viv.
And I'm so pleased that they've just taken off like they have.
And look, you've got TSMC, it's the same kind of situation as well, you know, which
makes up the whole chain.
From there on, you get NVIDIA.
And I think a lot of people are underrating NVIDIA as well.
You know, that's where I heard for the first time the two nano no, no,
it was at ASML's presentation when they spoke about reducing chips from
like what's it from?
Two nano 10 nanos to two nanos or something like that.
I said, you know, they're not going to stop.
You don't everybody thinks technology just comes to a a stencil.
These businesses are developing all the time,
as you heard from Viv in the early stages of this conversation, just what lies
ahead.
So you want to go down to value?
You know, you want to buy some bank or you want to buy some chap who makes nappies or
makes
cream for your face or something like that?
Yeah, well, go ahead.
Good luck.
This is at a different level.
Okay, so no one can stop.
Go on.
There's one more thing about One more, you talked about ASML, you talked about
NVIDIA, you talked about AMD and those kind of guys, right?
And TSMC.
The best performer in my AI portfolio in the last year has been what?
Micron.
They make the memory.
Yes, it is.
SK Hynix.
We're talking like tripling to the last year.
These are the companies that make the high because the chips do one thing,
but the memory is important because if you want to have these AI things do things,
you want them to remember stuff and have this huge what they call contact windows.
What you do is you have all the new information you have, you've got to apply
that information across the model To do that, you need a huge amount of memory.
These memory companies have gone ballistic.
In the last basically month or so, Samsung is up 40 percent.
People forget that Samsung is also one of these guys as well.
Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung are the guys that make the memory that you're looking
at.
They have gone like I said, ballistic in the last.
Micron also up almost 40 percent.
Of course, all these memory companies have gone crazy because you're going to have to
need this memory.
Before these things actually be useful, they have to be applied in the world and
then So yeah, that's another just one little extra thing to note there.
That it's these guys actually be the best performer in the sector.
Okay, so AI is not going to be stopped by anyone, least of all President Donald J.
Trump, the 47th president of the United States of America.
And David, he's becoming more and more bizarre.
He's becoming more and more radical.
He's becoming more and more rabidly racist, more authoritarian.
He even said in a Reuters interview in the last 36 hours, that he doesn't see why
there should be any midterms,
because every midterm the president, the sitting president actually loses.
I mean, he's actually said this to Reuters, a respected news agency with a
fairly decent audience.
David, he's gone completely bonkers.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm trying to find a word.
I know that you've got Trump derangement syndrome.
I've got fatigue syndrome.
I don't know how to put it into something like that.
But I'm...
I'm getting very worried.
Yes.
You know, I'm getting worried about where the United States is going and where it's
heading.
And also why no one is standing up.
Why haven't there been much louder voices to his attack on Powell?
You know, calling everything from a moron to whatever.
No wonder this lady has a go, Pira has a go at him.
She says she thinks that she's furthering his aims and that she'll curry favor with
her boss.
You know, Apart from that, the Greenland, Venezuela, all these issues.
You know, why aren't people standing up to this?
One day he's going to bomb Iran.
He's not going to bomb Iran.
You know, it's just almost impossible to read him.
But I know the markets are just disregarding and saying this is all noise.
But from a personal point of view, from a person who has children in America,
who's going to please God, have great.
grandchildren there.
I don't know where this country is going and why people are not standing up to this
mad syndrome that is
developing.
I also find it depressing.
I was asked by a California organization, a small organization that wants to rebuild
America.
And they said, could you write something not about Trump,
but about how to counteract his mania?
And he said, come up with some good examples of how you can start from the
bottom up rather than the top down.
In other words, how to have a go at Trump.
Forget about that.
Just how to build from the bottom and, as I say, counteract him.
And I sat down and I just thought it's futile because there's nothing that can
stop him
for the very reasons that you've just said.
People are too scared of him and nobody stands in the way.
I mean, okay, 11 central bankers have signed some letter to say we stand with
Jay Powell but he doesn't care about that.
He doesn't care about Greenland.
He didn't even know the name of the president of Greenland or prime minister
of Greenland whatever it is.
But there are only five people these, you know.
Well, 57,000 technically.
But yeah, Viv, you've been...
This is why AI is probably Trump proof and recession proof because...
AI doesn't care about what David and I have just been talking about.
Do you care?
Yeah, look, I'm going to bring something in here.
And I think that it sounds crazy right now, but I've mentioned a while back to
you guys as well.
I don't know if it's Trump.
You know what I mean?
What I'm saying is, I'm saying that he's declining.
He's declining right now.
You can see that quite clearly.
Like you mentioned the stuff is forgetting.
And people think Trump is dumb.
Go watch an interview for Donald Trump from the 1990s, was not a dumb guy, right?
It's just that as people get to the age that they're getting to,
obviously you can see the signs of lack of capacity growing, if you know what I mean.
David's the same age, and he's not showing any signs.
Are you, David?
No, David, you're not 80, are you?
Nearly.
Three years.
I understand exactly what Viv is saying.
I know what he's saying.
Carry on.
You have guys like Stephen Miller who actually are… That's the one.
Stephen Miller, this guy, if we go back in history, he's like a cartoon villain.
He used to throw stuff on the floor at school.
And they asked him, why are you doing this?
It's for the janitors to pick up.
It's their job.
Yeah.
You know?
He basically would not be friends with any Mexican or people who are darker skinned
in high school and saying that, you know,
you were like subhuman or something.
This is in high school.
This guy has been like an avowed racist forever, from the time he was a kid.
J.D.
Vance, who I did say, like, you know, when Trump was elected, is probably going to be
president before the end of the term because of, you know,
There's a one in three chance of that happening.
I think it's probably like 50-50 at the moment, that by the end of the term, Jenny
Baird is president.
Basically, he's, I don't think as innately, you know, misaligned,
let me say, as Stephen Miller, but he seems to be a craven coward when it comes
to power.
I mean, do you see this?
I mean, he's married to an Indian woman, right?
And do you see the stuff that goes on with the Republican Party and all that kind of
stuff?
And he's not stepping up.
I mean, it's like people have mentioned the fact that he doesn't step up to people
and say really bad things about his wife, you know what I mean?
And his kids.
I mean, that is pretty like, you know, I would say craving, but he's probably going
to be, like I said, the next person in there.
I don't, listen to what the Aka had to say, I don't think he'll be the next
president elected.
That being said, because even if you look back at history of the US, right, go back
all the way to like, you know, the last 40-something years.
You're not going to find anyone besides Reagan that had a VP be their successor.
Obama was super popular, his VP couldn't make it.
Clinton was even more popular, his VP couldn't make it, right?
So Trump put his unpopularity.
I don't think Jeannie Bads becomes the next elected president of the United
States, but I do think he becomes the next president.
Or at least a 50% chance of it happening because of health issues and so on.
But the thing is that this is what really worries me.
And this is speculation, of course.
But should we have the AI takeoff?
The AI takeoff is what they call, I mean, this is the term they use.
It's called FOM, F-O-M.
It happens when your AI becomes smart enough to start doing research on AI
itself.
At that point in time, you find huge exponential increases in power and so on
coming through.
If that happens during Trump's term, you will start to see jump ups in GDP that are
going to be spectacular.
You're going to start to see increases in like new technology that are going to be
quite remarkable.
That could actually be the thing that gets you the JD VATS elected presidency,
because who's going to not elect the guy that was vice president when your GDP grew
10% in the last two years?
Are we already seeing it with that print that we saw from the US GDP?
Or was that just a not a fudged number, but a skewed number 4.3% when the market
was expecting three and a half percent,
something like that?
Was any of that down to AI input?
I think it's starting to happen, but I think that's also a larger impact was
probably the shutdown.
Yeah.
You know?
So I think that was like a skewed number happening.
But I do think that, you know, I've seen people out there predicting between 4% and
6% GDP growth in the US this year.
Okay.
That is an insane number.
I mean, European Union can't do one and a half percent.
We as Africa can't do one and a half percent.
And how is the world's largest, most developed economy doing three times what
we are doing?
You know what I mean?
This is China numbers.
This is India numbers.
This is stuff you do not see in a large-scale economy.
And if you do have that happen, if you do suddenly have Americans basically living
in an economy where they are making, you know,
or the GDP is going up like 10% a year, the one thing that might come against
that, which might be even worse than Trump administration,
as shocking as it might be, is that what you do is you actually stimulate the envy
response,
which is what you get in California at the moment with that wealth tax.
Which is the most incredibly...
I mean, if I had to describe this wealth...
I don't know if you've seen it, Lindsay.
Have you seen this wealth tax in California?
No, no.
Tell me about it.
Okay, this is it.
It's a wealth tax, right?
But it's a tax of 1% of your net wealth, right?
Every year for five years.
So it's 5% of your wealth.
Except how do they measure your wealth?
It's not by what you own.
It's by the control you have of a company.
So the guys at Google, for instance, control more than half the company because
they have what they call super voting shares, right?
And so...
You don't count how much they actually own in dollar terms.
They count 50% of Google, which would be equivalent to something over the five-year
period, like half their wealth would be taxed.
But here's the thing.
They have to pay the tax in cash.
So first, they've got to sell those shares, pay capital gains, and take that
value and pay off the tax in California.
What's going to happen?
Obviously, the guys from Google have left California now.
Then you have guys that own things like, for instance, OpenAI or whatever, which
are untraded shares.
They still have to sell those shares somehow, get liquid and pay off this tax.
So California is destroying its Silicon Valley.
It may not exist in the next three years or so in California because of these three
attacks.
And why is this occurring?
It's occurring because people are starting to see inequality rise.
The same thing is Mamdani in New York.
He's the same situation.
And you're starting to see this happening in, there's a guy called Gary Stevens in
the UK, talking about the wealth tax.
The French just passed, the lower house was passed, I don't know if the French
political system as well,
but the French left has tried to pass a law basically making a wealth tax of a
minimum of 2%
of your wealth per year.
And if you try to leave, they want to make it five or ten years, you know, basically,
so if you live in France now,
you still have to pay for 10 years after you leave.
This is happening around the world, even though wealth taxes are known to be
terrible everywhere in the time it's been bad.
But why they're doing this?
It's because this inequality might be rising to an extent that it's going to
cause that.
So the thing is that we are approaching these points of huge growth, huge GDP
growth,
but it's probably going to result either in a Trump or GD Vance presidency, because
of course,
it's going to be said over the wall is wonderful, a utopia like you said, and
both for the guy that got it to us,
or it's going to result in a backlash which is going to bring socialism into
play, which unfortunately, you know,
even the world is bad as the right wing is.
The socialists are, as that is some cases, worse than them.
And I think that's the situation going forward in places like the US at the
moment.
Well, you two chaps stop making plans now if what Viv has just sketched out does
come to fruition.
Now then, David, I know you don't particularly like commodities.
You look at them with an indulgent eye.
But silver must interest you because I remember after Liberation Day,
the silver price was below $30 per ounce.
It dipped down below there because every market dipped down below every single
level that it had just very briefly.
Then I remember sending a tweet out, an X out, mid-October, I think it was, to say,
is it time to ring the bell on silver?
Because it was $51 per ounce.
You did say that.
And then it's now above $90.
So it's nearly doubled and then it's nearly doubled again.
Now, tell me something.
I remember the days of Bunker Hunt when Bunker Hunt tried to corner the silver
market.
Has silver got a use now, David?
And Viv, come in on this one as well.
Has silver suddenly become a PGM, if you like?
I think its only real use is on solar panels where it's used quite extensively.
But one of the driving forces was silver has always been I call it poor man's gold
But it's always been an alternative to gold for those who can afford it.
It's the only country that really accumulates a metal as a safe haven.
It's very closely associated to America.
But you know, Trump wanted to put all kinds of taxes on imported minerals and
metals and copper and so on.
And I think the fact that there was a fear...
that he would do it.
And for that reason, I think there's been a huge accumulation before this happens.
But its rise from, say, 50 to 90, I can't explain.
You know, the sheer pandemonium behind it, which we can explain for platinum as well,
I'm not quite sure who the forces are that have been accumulating in as much or the
frenzy
behind that.
I really don't know who's been paying those kind of levels for this.
I would imagine that there's massive speculation around this,
and my fear is that we've seen before that when this does slow down, it slows down at
an incredible pace.
So it's astonishing me.
I look more for the other metals to make any kind of decision,
but when you start to go into gold and platinum and silver at these kinds of
levels, or at this kind of pace,
you know that there's going to be pain somewhere down the line.
Yeah, Viv, the commodity cycle such as it is, I mean the oil price, even without the
oil price,
the Commodity Research Bureau index is at an all-time record high at the moment, or
just below an all-time record high.
So if oil started to go as well because of a reigniting of the Iran tensions between
Iran and the United States of America,
oil went to 75, 80 dollars per barrel, the metals kept on going, the dollar kept on
eking its way downwards,
then you've got a commodity cycle that's continuing to run, which means the rand,
of course, Viv, will go to 14,
14.50 from its current level of, what is it, 16.30, 16.40?
Who would have thought it, Viv?
Yeah, look, I mean, with regards to precious metals, I mean, have you guys
talked about the BRICS unit yet?
No.
The proposed there's a thing called the BRICS unit we propose, which would be like
a way for it's called the unit UIT.
And it's a 40% gold-backed, 60%
currency-backed kind of currency,
like de facto currency being created between the BRICS countries and so on for
cross-border trade.
Right.
And of course, that requires a lot of gold.
I think one reason that gold is doing so well is because of course what's happening
with Powell and the US Fed, etc.
But with regards to silver, firstly, a couple things today.
This is maybe again, because I'm coming across like the guy with the tinfoil hat
all the time.
But there's been speculation about silver's market manipulation for a long
time.
I mean, people would like a bit of history, because I mean, only David Yeo
was in the river business, was the silver market manipulation 1980s, you know what I
mean?
So yeah, there has been that kind of stuff happening in the past.
And so there's rumors about silver manipulation at the moment.
But when it comes to oil, I mean, you see Iran blowing up.
If Iran blows up, you'd be lucky to see $180 oil.
Forget about $80 oil.
And in that scenario, I'm almost certain we'd have a recession in South Africa.
Because, I mean, because what Iran controls is what's called the Straits of
Hormuz.
If you look at the percentage of Middle Eastern oil that goes through that place,
it's huge.
And here is the thing that people forget.
This oil does not go to America.
It goes to where?
It goes to China, right?
So the US has the ability to blow up
Iran and cause oil to spike in a way that will directly harm China.
The incentives are scary.
On the other hand you could say that if the regime changes then there's more
investment in the oil industry from foreign companies and therefore the oil
starts to flow even more than it is now and therefore that's bearish like some
people were saying that a medium term
the Venezuela situation is bearish for the oil price.
And initially, there was a little bit of a spike up from about 61, 62,
up to 65 with Brent crude.
So I would say that, in fact, the bullish people would say exactly the opposite to
you, Viv.
But we'll wait and see.
At the moment, oil still… By one point, when did we last had a peaceful regime
change that immediately resulted in more
GDP growth?
That has not happened in the Middle East in a very long time, right?
Very true.
And the other thing is, the Shah of Iran's son really does look like his father,
doesn't he?
If you've been seeing interviews with him, David, he looks remarkably like him.
And he keeps on saying, I'm the best person to lead the country.
I can tell you something.
If I were him, I wouldn't sit for 10 hours.
It's climbing down quite a bit, hey?
We don't know any information.
Nothing new has come through from that.
And this seems to suggest that they've got this under control.
We haven't heard of any more deaths.
No more videos that come through or anything.
So I don't know where we are, but it's out of the limelight.
It's not in the headlines anymore, which I find is quite sad because
I think most people, most of the world would have wanted some kind of change
there,
particularly understanding who's in charge.
So I don't know.
I don't know.
It seems pretty quiet at the moment, which I think is a bad sign.
Gentlemen, welcome back.
Thank you very much for your time on a Friday.
You've terrified me brilliantly, by the way.
Thank goodness I can sit down and watch some football over the weekend.
We will be back at our normal time next Thursday for the Five O'Clock Shadow.
David Shapiro is from Sasson Securities in Johannesburg and Viv Govender from the
award-winning RAND
Swiss. We'll see you
next week.
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