I was listening back to work Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington did for XFM before podcasts were cool in 2003. It was a normal conversation until Karl started speaking. Karl made an outrageous claim that honey bees have acquired a liking to alcohol. They indulge for recreational purposes like a human would. He claimed that honey bees love a good buzz (no pun intended). After a bender, they will fly clumsily under the influence back to base. Before he could finish, I had to interrupt my listen by pausing the playback to allow for my first deep laugh of 2022.
He wasn’t finished either. After I was all laughed out, I composed myself as best as I could and clicked play only for Karl to pile onto the absurdity. He continued to suggest that hive security doesn’t like drunks very much. When a honey bee is identified to have consumed some drink, it is kicked out of the hive to sober up.
Ricky and Stephen are generally more sensible. Karl’s strange conversation about drunk honey bees is a concept that you would find in an Adult Swim animation. I waited for Ricky and Steve to react with fierce cynicism to Karl’s obvious fairytale. It was not forthcoming. They seemed to be wise to the natural phenomenon. I’ve since done some research and you won’t believe this. It turns out… it’s kinda true. Bees are moving mad. Peep this, please.
“fact is madder than fiction bruv.” - a wise roadman
Honey bees are actual alcoholics 🤯. They cannot help themselves. Honey bees go on an extended period of continued alcohol abuse so much that it is endemic. Hive security often has to dismember repeat offenders in front of an audience to discourage other bees in the hive from partying too hard. I suppose honey bees take their work very seriously and will not have fellow intoxicated bees ruining it for everyone in front of the queen. It’s beyond me how honey bees discovered that fermented sugar can give you a bit of a buzz. Perhaps the discovery was accidental, but they clearly love it. Bees drink! Who knew?
Where Are We Now?
Global financial markets closed 2021 on a high. The S&P 500 (tracking US markets) closed the year up 27%. This was spurred by the energy sector (48%) that benefitted from soaring oil prices. Interestingly, this 2021 was the best year for the American energy sector on record. US Real estate went up 42% while tech and financials respectively rose by 33%.
The FTSE 100 (UK markets) finished the 12-month period 14.3% up. The best performance in a year since 2016. The pan-European STOXX 600 notched just 2.54%. The Nikkei (Japan) and Shanghai (China) Indices finished 4.9% and 1.95% higher respectively. China experienced a market collapse when Evergrande, the market’s second largest property firm, announced that it would fail to meet some obligations on its overseas bonds. That’s what finance people say when they mean, “we’re broke.” This announcement affected other markets as well but we shook it off relatively quickly. Chinese authorities are at the scene and influencing a debt restructure that could result in the owner’s personal assets being sold off.
Coming closer to home, in Africa’s most industrialised country, South Africa, we observed the JSE ALSI rise by double digits as well. Finishing strongly at 24.2% higher when the market closed for the last time in 2021. The JSE also had a faux pas back in August when trading halted for about 5 hours because of technical challenges on processing a Naspers x Prosus swap transaction of gargantuan proportions that shattered JSE value traded records set back in 2017. We made it out of that as well. There were no lasting consequences except maybe the JSE’s reputation took a knock.
Taken together, this culminated in global equities rising by 17% (MSCI World Index). It seems that financial markets are moving in the preferred direction and experts believe 2022 will be a year where central banks raise interest rates. Equities don’t like rate rises. To understand why, an increase in interest makes debt securities more attractive to investors. So they start taking money out of stocks, which are generally riskier than bonds, into the more secure debt instruments that are now yielding more after rate hikes. Every time a market becomes unpopular, it becomes cheaper. Hence, equity growth may slow down should it unfold as experts suggest. The operative word there is “may”. It will be interesting to see how inflation responds to these measures and where oil prices will end up because going to the filling station is cutting a little too deep for me, personally, atm. Or will it be a case of what goes up must come down in 2022?
The global economy itself will not hit the double digit growths observed in the financial markets. In this article we distinguished between the economy and equity markets. They do not move in lockstep but generally tend towards same direction. This is not to be misconstrued as financial advice. For investment related advice, please contact an authorised financial services provider.
BlackBerry is Dead
Not to kick a man while he is down, but BlackBerry is finally dead. For real this time. A day after my birthday, BlackBerry announced that they were ceasing support for all devices running BlackBerry OS. This means that the Canadian company that once dominated the smartphone industry is throwing in the towel having been overtaken by Android and iOS smartphones. This comes during a week where Apple touched a $3 trillion valuation. As one dies, another flourishes. Mufasa once said, “You must take your place in the circle of life.”
The once ubiquitous smartphone amongst business executives will, as of January 4, cease to function as a phone. You will not even be able to get through to dispatch an SOS call. The story is finished. The company stated that their devices would no longer make calls, receive or send data or messages over any cellular network.
BBM was ahead of its time though. We will give them that, but the physical qwerty keyboard is just inferior to the touch screen. The company will continue to focus on cybersecurity and embedded operating systems for cars, two areas that also happen to be high priority for both Google and Apple.
BlackBerry’s guilty of a capital crime in tech, failing to innovate. In 2007, when Steve Jobs proposed the iPhone, the then BlackBerry CEO said that it was, to use his words, an “impossibility” and “illogical”. It looked like he had a point at first, Apple suffered serious setbacks and was subjected to a myriad of lawsuits; but sooner rather than later, Apple got their devices functioning to acceptable levels and by the time BlackBerry noticed the miraculous improvements, they were already followers. The race for car operating systems is on. There is no clear leader yet, but is your money on BlackBerry? Are you worried that history will repeat itself? Yeah? Me too.
The Finnish Workday
Back in 2019, the Prime Minister of Finland, Sanna Marin, floated the idea of reducing the work day from 8 hours to 6, and chopping one day off the work week so we only work for 4 days. She is really passionate about the work-life balance. She just came back from a month-long vacation that she used to take her child to amusement parks. Oh, she means it! In case you thought she was playing.
Europeans take the longest paid vacations in the world. They take about 4 to 6 weeks vacation every year. Sanna’s proposal will chop off a further 50 or so days from the work calendar. Portugal already made it illegal for bosses to contact subordinates after work. Europe just doesn’t want to work anymore.
Microsoft tested a four-day work week in Japan more than 2 years ago and supposedly productivity shot up by 40%. I want to believe it, but Japanese work culture tends towards extremities. You have to be careful when you consider their relationship with work. The same study showed that use of office resources like power and paper reduced dramatically. This is easier to accept prima facie. The study further surveyed participants in the experiment to find that 92% of staff preferred the shorter work week. Go figure. I’m sure we would observe similar ratings if we were to repeat this experiment in Eswatini.
PM Sanna Marin’s plans for a shorter work day and a shorter work week remain in development. I think we are inching closer and closer to Tim Ferris’ 4-hour work week Utopia.
More News
The premises of the Central Transport Administration (CTA) in Mbabane caught fire on Monday. The damage caused is estimated to a value just under E4 million. It is suspected that this was not an accident. Perhaps there are arsonists behind the disaster. Gov has signalled its intention to strengthen security features at CTA premises to ensure that such an occurrence never repeats.
What I’m Reading
Surprise, surprise I’m still reading a book I started reading… I don’t even remember how many weeks ago… called The Count of Monte Cristo. Things just always seem to work out for whom we colloquially refer to as the “starring.” The convenient coincidences inherent to storytelling are picking up now. If you want all the spoilers in sequence, you can start here.
As the story unfolds, Dantes (protagonist, wrongly imprisoned) just happens upon a sinking boat and shortly after, a pirate ship. I think they are pirates. I’m not sure anymore but they could have also been smugglers 🤔. But what’s difference between a smuggler and a pirate? Anyway, the pirates/smugglers rescue a drowning Dantes from the cold ocean waters. Dantes fabricates a story about how he was the sole survivor of the boat accident aforementioned. He claims he was the captain, fearing that if he should divulge his true identity - escaped convict - the smugglers might be reluctant to help him. You know, Dantes is described as a good, upright citizen throughout the book but I have to say this. For a good man, he is a prolific liar!
Edmond makes a full recovery and secures employment with the smugglers, as the reader will recall that he worked as a sailor before his arrest. His smuggling takes him all over the sea until, eventually, another happy coincidence occurs where he happens upon the shores of Monte Cristo; the island where Faria’s (dead inmate companion) treasure was buried. He promptly locates the treasure and instantly becomes the richest man in the story. He employs one of his many deceptive devices to convince his smuggler crew to abandon him on the island so that he doesn’t have to share the treasure with anyone. I can’t be bothered to make the conversions to Emalengeni because I wouldn’t even know where to start. Point is, he is Elon Musk now. He is buying boats and employing spies all over the place so he may begin to avenge his wrongful imprisonment.
Dantes learns that his father passed away shortly after he was imprisoned. It is not yet known what happened to his fiancé. He was in prison for 14 years. How strong would your love have to be to survive 14 years without contact?
The first person out of the three men behind his arrest that he locates is Caderousse, who was his neighbour as a free man. He is the guy who actually inspired Fernand (the one who coveted his fiancé) and Danglars (the jealous first mate) to frame Edmond. Edmond is now taking steps to reward the three for their respective roles in his arrest. All this happens in over 300 pages and Dantes still hasn’t killed anyone. I don’t know if he will; I got a hunch though. I’m still loving the book.
If anything else happened this week, I missed it. Till next Sunday 👋🏾.
Comments