You're listening to Strictly Business Podcast with Lindsay Williams.
The JSC has closed its doors for another day, so it's time for the 5 o'clock
shadow.
And as always on a Thursday, I speak to Viv Govender from RAND Swiss in
Johannesburg and David Shapiro from Sassfin Securities,
currently in Boston.
David, how was your trip from New York to Boston?
Any problems?
Or you went on the train, didn't you?
No, I went on the train.
I'm back in New York at the moment.
I came back on Monday, so I'm back here.
But nothing's changed.
Still a very confused northeastern United States.
I'm a prolific watcher of the news.
Yes.
And it's obvious that Mr.
Trump is in a very difficult position.
He's stranded in the middle, criticized by the right and criticized by the left,
and not quite sure how to appease even the center.
So, the certainty is certainly not in his favor, but he's just like one of those
bunnies that you see at a fair.
You know, you shoot it, it goes the other way.
You shoot it, it runs, keeps reversing.
You know, he's, I think, a lot of confusion at the moment.
And I'm surprised that markets are holding up as well as they are, you know,
considering the circumstances.
But I think people here are getting very impatient.
And, you know, want to know what he's thinking is, and that's not easy to
establish.
So it's very difficult.
I was hoping, I was saying, oh, I hope Lindsay doesn't phone or I don't have to
speak to Viv.
I'm sitting here just looking at my screen.
Did you hear that, Viv?
He didn't want to speak to us.
Did you know that?
Even David Shapiro, even the implacable David Shapiro, Mr.
Media himself.
doesn't want to talk about it.
That is how it is affecting people.
That's how confusing, yeah.
I agree with you.
Lindsay, you know, that's how absolutely confusing it is.
And, you know, clients ask you, well, what do we do?
And, you know, from one minute to the next, it's all, when I say it's all over
the place, you know,
you wake up in the morning and markets can go up and down many times during the day.
Yesterday we had a good day because there could have been some talks today.
There's no talks and so on.
Anyway, I just have the last word.
Just before I came on to this, I was looking at YouTube, and I wanted to get
the
Holy Grail extract of Monty Python's Holy Grail
YouTube piece of when they go to a castle and they want to
seek shelter for the night, and it's a Frenchman's castle.
I remember when he starts, insulting them that they smell like, you know,
their mom smells like endelberries or whatever.
It's hysterical.
And, you know, the whole negotiation, and this is just Trump looking up at the
Iranians and the Iranians,
you know, sending down chickens,
dead chickens and cows and melting them with anything they can find.
And, you know, it just reminds me of the futility of where we are at the moment.
It's futile, but it's unfortunately a little bit more dangerous than a few
smelly chickens in a Monty Python film.
And I know the clip you're talking about is still a classic.
Viv, while David's looking that up, it is very dangerous indeed,
because it's a war that was conceived and initiated on the whim of a
person who's never had anything to do with being a soldier, has no military
experience.
and thinks he knows everything.
So even when someone like Pete Hegseth, who's his Secretary of War, as he calls
it,
but still legally the Secretary of Defence, also hasn't really got the
experience to be where he is.
And so therefore they go in blindly because, as they say, they've got the best
military in the world.
You can have the worst military in the world and the best strategy and you've
still got more of a chance.
Viv, it's out of control now, don't you think?
Yeah, look, I mean...
The thing is that the problem is that they do have the best military in the world.
That's the temptation, because you have this immensely powerful weapon.
You can do anything you want militarily, virtually.
And that's the temptation that Trump has, I think, kind of gotten into.
The problem is that, as you mentioned, strategically, there's no way out of this
thing.
The straits of Amur, it's going to be very difficult to close that off.
I'll get boots on the ground because you need to basically stop, you know, these
small drones, these waterborne drones,
even just flying ones.
There's ones that's basically unmanned boats that can go on the water, that you
need to stop that.
And you get on the basically the shoreline of some islands, as well as on maybe the
Iranian shoreline as well to stop that.
You also have, you know, in fact, the Iranians now, strangely enough,
are in a better fiscal situation in some ways than they were before the war.
Because not only are they selling a little bit more oil than they were before, but
they're selling at a significantly better price.
And also their big allies in Russia are effectively.
You know, I think the Russians are pretty much out of the stranglehold.
You know, they've made a fortune with oil.
They've made a fortune with fertilizer at the moment.
And that, I think, is a big issue.
And then finally, I mean, they should be keeping an eye on what's happening in
China.
Because the Chinese are looking at this and waiting for the Americans to get boots
on the ground, get really tangled up in a quagmire, and then suddenly Taiwan's in
trouble.
And if you think the problem with oil is bad, wait till you see what happens when
you take out 90% of the world's, you know,
high-end chips.
I mean, the world becomes a very different place.
And all because, like I said, I think Trump and maybe Hexer, but I think Trump
mainly,
because we want to gather most people in the administration, with a few exceptions,
who are very much against this thing.
They don't know why Trump did it.
They don't know exactly what made him do it at this point in time.
And basically, yeah, it's a massively self-inflicted wound that he's done here.
We're going to lose the midterm elections by a lot more, possibly lose the Senate.
We're certainly going to lose this Congress, possibly lose the Senate.
We lose those two houses.
And given all of Trump's issues, I expect the next few years of his life are going
to be a lot of, you know,
interrogations in front of Senate committees and Congress committees, you
know, like Bill Clinton was about the Mani Kulikwinski thing, you know,
about Ronald Reagan was, you know, about Iran-Contra.
And, but taken to another level.
It's going to be a very, very tough period for the next couple of years, given stuff
that he's done here.
David, is anyone in New York or on any of the channels that you watch or any of the
pages that you read,
is anyone saying anything about Trump's health?
Because it looked really, really bad when he was at that GOP fundraiser last night.
I don't know where it was, but it was somewhere in Washington because he's back
now.
He looked awful and was slurring so badly.
Surprisingly not.
You know, I haven't, nothing's been like that.
And I'm...
Just surprised that everybody's been so calm, that they're just asking questions,
but no direct criticism around him.
It's coming in the, you know, you get it in places like I read The Atlantic or you
read The Free Press or you read
maybe The New York Times and places like that.
You know, there's massive criticism, but nothing around his health.
But it's, he pittens the blame now on Pete Hexeth.
you know he he He put him in front of the firing squad by saying, oh, well,
Pete came to me with a few generals, you know, worried about the nuclear bomb.
And they were a short distance away from doing it a short time.
You know, and funny enough,
Pete Hexeth is a lot more articulate when he's asked to speak than Trump.
You know, if he's put in front of a mine, he was a media person.
So he's pretty articulate and he's...
You know, his mind is well framed on the arguments,
but you can see that Trump is floundering.
You know, I don't think he was fully familiar with, he couldn't really make a
decision and said, OK,
I'll go with you boys, you know, let's bomb the hell out of Iran.
So that's what it's come down to.
But he's struggling to backpedal.
You know, he's struggling to get himself out of this kogma.
And I...
Lindsay, the other thing is I'll wait for someone on the Democratic Party to rise.
You know, there's no one coming through who's a powerful voice.
Chuck Schumer, certainly not.
Or Hakeem Jeffries, you know, on the House side of it.
They're not the personalities that can actually stand up and really swing the
Democratic Party,
even though, and Viv is correct, I think.
He's going to be swamped in the midterms should things continue like this.
But that's at a different level.
You know, it's a state level or sorry, it's an individual state level or
alternatively,
maybe in the House or Senate.
But you need you need the cabinet.
You need a strong leader who can actually get the vote for president.
And no one's come across there.
There's still a lot of dissension within the Democratic Party itself.
How long can...
Viv, I'll put this one to you because David's surprised that markets have held
up so well.
How long can markets hold up so well?
S&P, I look now, down 0.7%. Oil price $106.07 a barrel.
Every single economist worth his or her salt is now putting out their predictions
for 2026.
Brave people.
If the oil price goes here, then inflation in the United States will go to 4.7%.
All those little numbers.
which, of course, are completely spurious because we don't know what the war is
going to bring or how
long it'll take to bring it.
But at some stage, someone's going to say, you know, everything's negative now.
The big tech companies are getting hit because children are depressed, that sort
of thing,
because of that lawsuit that came to fruition last night in Los Angeles.
Everything is suddenly negative.
Is it going to crack at some stage, i.e.
more than 0.64% like we're seeing now on the S&P?
Almost certainly.
Look, I mean, what you can understand, of course, is that it's going to be...
very uh you know regional as well if you just look at the differential between say
for instance all prices in the us versus all prices in the middle
east you know it's quite a massive differential and that basically comes
through like in you know all prices are significantly higher
than yours all prices so india and asia more completely affected so you're looking
at things like philippines save emergency
thailand they basically say work from home uh you talk about
rationing of fuel etc that's possible out there these places are being much more
effective The U.S.
might have high inflation.
It might have, say, 7%, 8% inflation.
But they had the Biden administration, 9% of the highest.
It's not really going to be much more than an irritation.
But there's places in the world where this is going to be existential, especially in
Asia and in Africa as well.
Because, I mean, we talked about it before we started, but the fertilizer situation
is horrendous.
And somebody phrased it.
I think it was a New York Times podcast.
Somebody phrased it.
They said, what we're going to have to do is we're going to have to.
Find a price for oil that's going to destroy something between 10 and 20
percent of global demand.
Oil is a very inelastic commodity.
You have to raise prices quite significantly, drop demand between 10 and
20 percent.
What's going to happen if you do that is that places like China, Europe and
definitely the U.S.
are going to be able to afford it much better than places in like, you know, for
instance, India or, you know, some other poorer countries in Africa.
And what's going to happen is that you're going to find a lot of oil being diverted.
from these places to places that can pay the money number one number two when it
comes to fertilizer we are going into you know
springtime in the northern hemisphere look at a world map see how much of the world
is in the north and how much of the farmland is in the north you know what i
mean
it's quite a bit um and then you're going to find these places not being able to get
enough fertilizer maybe under fertilizing their crops
lower yield it's sowing season viv i live in a rural area and all the tractors are
out now they're plowing the fields and the seeds are
going in and for that they need fertilizer and it's being choked off as you quite
rightly say food prices will go through the roof if it
continues and exactly and again people somewhere in the world are going to be
much better able to
pay that food price increase europe um north america etc
some places especially sub-saharan africa it's going to be killing people i mean not
i'm not to be hyperbolic here We are talking...
the possibility of famine.
And not just one or two thousands.
It could be huge.
And this is a global disaster.
And the problem is that I don't, honestly, like I talked about a couple weeks ago, I
don't see how this ends.
I just don't know how it ends.
There's a very good point that I just want to...
I did the translation, particularly for South Africa.
You're buying petrol here at 360.
a gallon.
It might be going up, you know, each petrol station can put their own price on.
That's how free it is here.
But let's call it 360, which translates to 16 rand a litre.
You know, that's what it is.
So that's what they pay.
We're going up to 26 rand a litre in Johannesburg in South Africa.
But there's another thing, and you mentioned it, you actually pointed out
this, they can afford it.
They earn four times more.
than we do.
You know, an American, the average American, in Rand terms,
the average American salary is around about a million Rand a year, plus 1.1
million.
In South Africa, it works out at 300,000 or something.
So that's the mean across all the income earners.
I doubt it's 300,000 plus Africans.
Well, I'm being generous.
I'm being very generous.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
I'm being very, from that point of view, you know where I'm going to.
because obviously even those who are earning a few million only fill up their
tanks.
You know, they use as much petrol as the person at the bottom end of the scale.
So from a South Africa's point of view, and we've mentioned emerging markets,
emerging countries,
they're going to take one hell of a slam.
And even the JSE is actually holding up a lot better than I thought it would.
You know, Lindsay, the governor spoke today.
I think he was very well balanced in that.
But hawkish.
You know, rates obviously didn't go down.
Yeah, yeah.
But I think he's got a very there are two things in South Africa.
It's obviously, number one, supply.
And the other is price and how this translates and how this filters through to
our whole economy.
Particularly where we use you know, people use taxis every day to get into town,
to get to their jobs, you know, backwards and forwards and so on.
I mean the impact on the low level of earners is going to be enormous.
Tell me something, it's open to both of you.
Inelastic demand for oil is one thing.
You've also got a relatively inelastic demand for food you have to eat.
Also shelter, you have to have a roof over your head.
So that's essentially, I suppose,
the three areas that can't be skimped upon in your household budget.
If, therefore, one of them, oil, goes shooting up...
It takes away from the discretionary spend on other things, you know, like David
going off to having a cappuccino, etc.
So there are certain areas of goods that are going to experience lower demand and
therefore deflation.
So the oil price going up, although statistically means CPI goes higher, in
reality,
certain people's baskets go down because prices are going down because they're not
buying the stuff anymore.
David, you're agreeing with me here.
Absolutely right.
pitch.
That's what we don't understand.
You know, the bulk of the people can handle it.
I mean, sorry, very few people can handle it.
But for the bulk of the people, it's going to have an enormous impact on, you know,
maybe those who get a social grant of a few hundred rand a month or so on, you
know,
they'll continue to buy their vegetables and hopefully places like
Checkers or ShopRite and that will keep those prices of absolute essentials down.
you know, won't pass it on as they have done in the past.
But I mean for, but even if you take logistic companies,
if you take getting everything to harbor or something,
the increase in price just eats into margins dramatically.
And the other one, as Viv said, is fertilizer and chemicals.
You know, we underrate, we underestimate the impact that this has on the chemical
prices as well because
Oil always is a massive input into that area.
Okay, it all looks very grim.
It really does.
And I think there'll be strategists and people even cleverer than you two sitting
down and saying,
what does this mean for our portfolios?
I've spoken to two portfolio managers, one in London and one in South Africa,
who have been long of this market in various ways, whether it be copper, gold
or...
Platinum Group Metals producers, and they've all, they said, we've been really
active in the last month.
We have now gone overweight here and underweight there, etc.
And I won't say what it is and who they were, but there have been significant
changes.
People are positioning themselves for a different future.
People that think they're clever anyway are positioning themselves for a different
future.
Viv, I'm going to go to you now because I'm going to ask you, have you positioned
yourself?
differently over the last month since this war began yes i mean look uh uh on a
personal level i
bought an electric car um you know um which one have you got please tell us
which one you bought what did
you buy if you're going to get the chinese brands i've got a cherry uh so it's
basically
quite cheap it's it's it's it's like cheap cheap for like you know obviously we do we
are more present in our point here
But compared to what you would consider the comparable kind of things out there
from a BMW or a Toyota.
This is a hybrid, though, hey?
It's a hybrid, yeah.
It's a hybrid.
Yeah, it's a hybrid.
It's a plug-in hybrid.
So you can plug it into your electricity supply if you have solar, or you can put
petrol in.
But I think what I wanted to mention here is that we talk about petrol.
The diesel price is going up more than 50%, 5-0% next week.
Now, as much as petrol is, from a personal point of view, fuel petrol.
But diesel is by far the most important source of power in the world.
It's tractors, it's bulldozers, it's trucks, it's planes, it's ships, it's
mining equipment.
All these things are diesel.
The price of diesel has been up 50 plus percent from 18 to 28 next week.
That's basically well more than 50 percent, so it's about 60 percent up next
week.
Already we started to see in South Africa, there's questions about people basically
you know stockpiling it because remember if you're on a farm or you're in a in a
construction place not taking your bulldozer or your tractor to the
petrol station you're taking a tank you know what i mean and filling it up there
and these guys have the ability to go and buy if you had a thousand liter tank uh
basically you're paying 18 000 runs this week next week you'll be paying 28 000
runs for a thousand liter tank of diesel
that's a huge huge uh you know so we obviously come through in a very big way
but in terms of my own personal thing i
I've got a lot more cautious for clients.
I've argued like in the last like week or two, the last month or two actually, that
I think that, you know,
Having things that are more capital protected, you know, basically capping
upside for protection of your capital is probably a good idea right now.
The last year we had the local stock market going 50% in dollars, 5-0% in
dollars.
We had, you know, huge returns in Europe.
We had, you know, even the US, which is basically the laggard in the world, was
still up double digits, you know, which is unusual.
You know, usually positive in terms of like just how the average return of the US
markets usually are.
But this...
next couple of years, it's probably not going to be like that, unless we have the
AI revolution coming about and really pushing things to new levels.
But I do think this is the case.
We are going to see uncertainty really skyrocket over the next couple of months,
because I still think when you watch big traders in the US,
you watch people in the markets, they're still talking about a quick solution to
this.
Like I said, I don't know what the quick solution is.
I think the Iranians right now are looking at themselves and saying, we now control
20% of the world at right we are the
The largest, you know, have the control of the large amount of oil in the world, more
than the US, more than Russia, more than anybody.
We basically are making more money now than people in the past.
Like it's $136 million a day they're making at the moment.
And also, if we give in to these guys, we are probably going to die.
You know, that's the answer to it.
Right?
And that's just the Iranians.
The Chinese are looking at us and saying, the Americans are about to get into a new,
what do you call this, you know, Vietnam.
Or New York, I don't know what you're going to think about it.
Russians are saying to themselves, well, we basically have ended all the stuff.
The Indians are saying to themselves, we listened to the Americans and cut off our
Russian supply.
And now we have, by some measures, maybe a month or so of reserves left over.
And Europe and Africa and the whole world is readjusting.
And quite frankly, Trump, I think, like I said, after the next couple of months, is
going to be virtually a lame duck.
So that's another aspect to look at as well.
Unfortunately, as David said, the people that are coming on the other side, the
Democrats, are probably going to win the next election.
Unfortunately, not really going to Mars, the place you want to be.
You want some centrist people.
You want some people that are going to come about and basically be in the middle.
And unfortunately, what's happened here is that people are just going to the bases.
And you're going to have some of the most left-wing communist people ever being
elected to Congress and to Senate.
And the people that are going to run for the US presidency from the left are not
the central people.
There are going to be people that are going to be much more left-wing than
you've ever had in the past.
There's a good article by David Brooks, who I don't know if anyone's read him.
I think he wrote it in The Atlantic.
He calls it, America needs what he calls a trimmer, someone in the middle, you know,
who listens to both sides and adjusts, can swing, doesn't matter, you know, but still
does it for the people, you know,
can.
He gave an example, and I'm trying to think in politics of where he, you know,
he, oh, he went all the way back to
James II, when William the Orange.
Oh, yes.
Exiled to France, and William of Orange was invited to be King of England.
This is in the late 1600s, I think.
You know your English history a lot.
No, I drifted off when you mentioned English history.
Actually, sorry, David.
I didn't like my history teacher.
But, I mean, he mentioned that the Duke of Halifax was in the middle.
He supported both sides, and they called him a trimmer.
And I think America needs someone like that who can come in the middle and bring
both sides together.
There's one point I must make.
America's got as much oil as it wants, it's got as much diesel as it wants, but
you pay the international price.
There's no shortage.
It's just that because that's what economics is about, that's what free
markets are.
Even though they're producing as much as they need and they've got as much power as
they need,
you pay a much higher price and that is going to have an effect.
Also, they're almost immune from the rest of the world because they're not an
exporting nation in terms of it.
You know, they can't survive.
That's one of the dangers of all of this is that you don't feel it in the streets
here.
You know, you're not going to feel it in the streets as much as you feel it in the
rest of the world.
And I'm particularly, I think Europe is very, very vulnerable, you know, for the
reasons that we've discussed here as well.
And emerging markets, particularly emerging Africa.
Okay.
I think those are the weak points of all of this.
OK, the question that I put to Viv and he sidestepped it, except right at the end
when he said there was a note of caution,
he said he'd bought a cherry or something.
David, what about you?
Are you still stoically for your portfolio?
It's well positioned and you think it might even not be war proof,
but more resilient to the war and the effect of the war,
the long term effects of the war than most other portfolios.
I think so.
You know, I'm very concentrated in the choices that we make.
And I'm not quite prepared to forfeit them at these kind of levels.
Also, you know, when you forfeit them and sell, you pay huge amounts of tax.
And then when you want to come in, you know, you'll end up coming in at perhaps
higher prices than you went out.
But I'm not buying anything at the moment and I'm not putting fresh money in.
I'm staying where we are at the moment, you know, just just watching how this
plays out.
Viv was right, I think, saying that I think what the market is doing at the
moment, it's pricing.
Or is this you, Lindsay, pricing in a quick end?
That's why prices are holding.
I think it just looks back at previous experiences with war and other
geopolitical events and even liberation days.
And they say, oh, it doesn't matter.
It's all going to blow over.
I just want to read you something that came up on LinkedIn today.
And it's via TikTok.
So it's two social media platforms.
coming together and it says this is from
Putin listen carefully Mr Trump hitting hard very Iran hitting Iran very hard
uh let me start it again sorry it's going very quickly listen carefully because this
message is direct you speak you speak about hitting Iran
hard you talk about destruction more bombs let me remind you of something important
History has seen many leaders who believed they could control the fire of war, and
every one of them learned the same lesson.
Fire spreads, Iran must surrender, you say Iran is finished,
but war in the Middle East is not a television show, and it's not a business
deal that can be won with threats.
If the US continues this reckless path, if Washington pushes the region closer to
chaos,
then do not be surprised when the consequences travel far beyond Iran.
Russia will not watch silently while other nations are threatened with destruction.
The world is already standing on the edge.
My advice is simple.
Stop speaking the language of bombs before the world answers back in the language of
war.
Because once that door opens, no president, no army and no superpower will
easily close it again.
Now remember that, Mr.
Trump.
And that is supposed to be what Putin said in the last 24 hours.
whether it's been...
claimed by him or not, whether it's true, I don't know.
I was thinking about a pot and kettle here, you know what I mean?
Yeah.
But it's very interesting that Donald Trump is the only person in the world that
can make you like Putin and make you think, oh, Mr.
Putin's actually right this time.
It's extraordinary.
I doubt whether he would have said anything like that.
No, I doubt it as well.
Who went on to Ukraine and who's battling at the moment, losing thousands of
soldiers a day.
but there was a lot of sense in whoever said that he's got yeah yeah but anyway i
i don't think he's got the energy to to
divert his attention elsewhere he's still trying to beat over ukraine which is now
four years old yes it
is four years and uh one and a half months actually it's horrible let's
have a look at the markets now the dollar around is 1704 that didn't last long did
it uh british pound against the round
2276 euro around 1968 euro dollar 115 50 the gold price This is weird.
It doesn't respond to it.
It responds in completely the opposite way that it should do.
In other words, geopolitical tension rises, i.e.
the war against Iran.
It should be rising.
But because the dollar rises, the dollar is now the recipient of safe haven funds,
and therefore the gold price goes down.
So gold is 44.50, down 1.2%.
Platinum, down another 4% now at 18%.
David, you were calling this three, four weeks ago.
Palladium, 1367, down
4.6%. Let's have a look at the all-important oil price and a couple of
other things as well.
Brent crude oil spot price, 107.78.
You'll see the market is in what's called a backwardation.
In other words, the spot price is higher than the futures price.
So if you look at your futures price on a site like investing.com, It's something
like $101.
But the actual spot price, if you want to buy oil now, it's close to $108 a barrel.
West Texas crude, $94.31.
That's 4.4% higher.
Brent incident is up 5.5%.
Natural gas prices up 2%.
Gasoline, $3.13 a gallon, up nearly 4%.
Heating oil up 6.5%.
Copper price down 0.8%, $5.48.
South African 10-year bond yield after the Reserve Bank today.
Lefty rates unchanged, 8.99%, which is also unchanged on the day.
U.S.
10-year, 4.39%.
Recent high about 4.45%.
S&P 500 futures down 0.7%, 65.94% for the June futures.
And the Bitcoin price doesn't know whether it likes war or doesn't like war.
It's 69,046, which is down 2.5%.
David, have you been looking at the JSC today or have you been worrying about
other things?
Have you seen any shares moving up or down that surprised you or didn't surprise you?
Well,
what's interesting is that exactly what we said when we were talking about who would
be
the best place to be would be in like ShopRite or Boxer.
or pick and pay at the bottom end of the grocery market or in the grocery market
rather than in clothing.
So on the top end, you've got ShopRite and Boxer.
On the bottom end, you've got Mr.
Price and TrueWorths and retailers like that who I think are going to clothing
retailers who are likely to suffer more
than perhaps the grocers.
So just a quick observation.
But the JSC was down just one and a quarter percent, which I thought held up
better than, you know,
I would have expected more of a sell-off.
But it's widespread right across the board.
Everything's down.
Volume's still quite good for Lindsay.
We're seeing $28 billion.
trade there.
But there's a lot of speculation on a day-to-day basis.
And naturally, with that gold price not performing, I think it's done.
It's more likely to be $3,000 than it is going to be $5,000 or $5,500, any new
highs.
Same with platinum.
I think once the speculators get hurt, they don't come back quickly.
And also, they've got to lick their wounds.
caught by a modern...
You're quite right, yeah.
It's a psychological thing now.
Once you've lost once, you don't go straight back in there.
Once bitten, twice shy, I think the phrase is.
On the board on the day, we've got ShopRite up three and three quarters
percent, Boxer up 3.3,
Tungela is either up or it's down this thing, depending on Mr.
Trump.
2.4 percent higher, Sassel up nearly 2 percent, 219 rand and 50 cents per share.
Mr.
Price down 3.7, Anglo-American down three and a third, Valtteri, 3.2% in the red,
Impala Platinum,
same thing.
And Nusper is coming in with a 2.9% loss.
Viv, if you were a social media tech company,
if you were a Google or a Meta or even YouTube, would you be worried about what
happened yesterday,
that ruling in Los Angeles?
Yes, I would.
I mean, remember, there's been cases in the past.
I mean, remember the Tuffington Power case for Johnson & Johnson.
You can recall the Because the breast implant cases as well back in the day,
especially mental health,
it's going to be very hard to prove things.
And in those cases, the talcum powder case and the breast implant cases, the science
was quite weak in terms of proving causation.
And yeah, I mean, how are you going to prove causation in terms of why are you
depressed?
It's a social media.
How can you be certain that the social media caused your depression?
But I do think that, first of all, these guys are unliked.
And so they are likely to face some kind of thing.
You saw Elon Musk, for instance, recently lose the case.
uh for the twitter you know acquisition where there's two billion dollars there i
think that uh they went against him for um again i think
it's basically a case where you're unpopular you're not going to get too much
support for the public uh and therefore you probably face a lot of
these kind of cases coming forward and jury cases are going to rule against the
rich guy in favor of the poor young support person that you can
say was harmed by this thing so yeah i do think it's going to be an issue um and you
know if you call back i mean people have mentioned the tobacco
cases I think that's the kind of stuff that you might find happening here as
well,
especially as these companies become more and more powerful with AI in the future.
Thank you very much for that, gentlemen.
Thank you very much.
We went around the houses today, didn't we?
We had fake TikTok Putin speeches.
We've had doom and gloom.
We've had electric cars and everything.
It's really interesting.
And I think a lot of the things that we've said today are going to come to.
to fruition in in other words this is not going to be a quick in and out like
venezuela it is going to become protracted just a
question of who who cleans up the mess and how the how the markets react but i i
firmly believe that there's there's
more to come it's there's there's too much sanguine behavior from the really big
players like blackrock with 14
trillion and i saw an interview with one of actually
the ceo of blackrock yesterday and he almost said if it continues
then our policy changes completely.
So anyway, we'll find out.
Thank you very much again.
Viv Govendous from Ranswiss.
David Shapirius from Sasson Securities.
And that was the 5 o'clock shadow.
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