George

[Sentletse 🇿🇦🇷🇺🇵🇸🇱🇧 @Sentletse]

Busisiwe Mavuso won’t be pleased

[PROTECT KAMALA HARRIS ✊️ @DisavooWTrump2]

This is U.S. Air Force Major Jason Watson. He was arrested today at the Capitol after calling for the impeachment of Donald Trump and JD Vance.

RETWEET if you are proud to stand with Major Watson!

[Mia Amor Mottley @miaamormottley]

Every human being has equal value. Every single one.

At the United Nations General Assembly, I challenged a world that still decides whose lives deserve protection and whose suffering can be ignored.

No race is superior. No people are disposable. Until we honour that truth, "everywhere is war" remains a warning we have failed to heed.

What the world needs now is love, with the courage to confront injustice and defend our shared humanity.

Love and a little kindness. For everyone.

[Brandon 🇵🇸 @Brandons__1]

"You've claimed Maduro had an International capture order, indicted at the ICC at the Hague, Interpolation Notice our for him.....

NONE OF THAT IS TRUE"

- Mehdi Hasan to Venezuelan Politician

[George @GeorgeKemptonPa]

@redgenkosi @SAReserveBank @Treasury_RSA Thanks Prof

[redge @redgenkosi]

@SAReserveBank @Treasury_RSA (This is a wonkish tweet). Wednesday's hike didn't come out of nowhere. It rests on a body of work, and its clearest statement is an IMF working paper published in November 2025 by Jana Bricco, Mario Mansilla, Delia Velculescu and Philippe Wingender, on the macroeconomic effects of lowering South Africa's inflation target from 4.5% (3-6% band) to 3%.

It deserves engagement rather than dismissal, so let me lay out what it claims and where I think it fails.

The claim: the move "may entail moderate near-term output costs (measured by the so-called 'sacrifice ratio'), while leading to medium-term output gains and lower borrowing costs." Costs fall when credibility lets expectations adjust faster. And: "Concurrent fiscal consolidation can help support the disinflation process and lower the marginal sacrifice ratio."

Three problems, in ascending order of seriousness.

First, the model. The simulations use the Fund's Global Integrated Monetary and Fiscal model, a DSGE framework in which output returns to a potential path determined by supply-side fundamentals. In such a model, disinflation is by construction temporary in its output effects. The result that costs are "moderate" is not a finding about South Africa, it is substantially an assumption about how the world works, imported through the model's architecture.

Second, hysteresis. The empirical literature, Blanchard and Summers on European unemployment, Cerra and Saxena on output losses after downturns, Ball on the permanent damage of the Great Recession, finds that demand contractions leave lasting scars: skills atrophy, capital is not installed, firms that would have existed do not. South Africa has run this experiment for three decades. Gross fixed capital formation fell for a second consecutive quarter in Q2 2026. Investment forgone today is capacity absent tomorrow, which means a higher price level tomorrow. A framework that cannot represent this will systematically underestimate the cost of disinflation and overestimate its benefit.

Third, the circularity of credibility. The paper's costs shrink when agents believe the announcement. So belief lowers the cost of the policy, and the policy is justified by its low cost. The mechanism that produces belief, however, is not argument. It is demonstrated willingness to tolerate unemployment. Credibility is purchased, and the currency is other people's jobs.

Then, the distributive arithmetic, which no model in this literature reports. The benefit, "lower borrowing costs", accrues to the state and to holders of its paper. The cost, the sacrifice ratio, accrues to workers who lose or never find employment. To call that trade-off "moderate" is to aggregate over people whose positions are not symmetric.

What would change my mind: a published estimate, for South Africa, of the employment and investment path implied by the 3% target under plausible hysteresis parameters, alongside the output gains. Not adjectives. Numbers, with confidence intervals, for both sides of the ledger.

@chrismalikane

[Jacob Maroga @jacob_maroga]

“We don’t just appoint a pliable board” - Ramokgopa

Cabinet has reappointed Dr Mteto Nyati as the Chairperson of @eskom .

This is a vote of confidence in Nyati as some noisy ‘energy experts’ have been campaigning for his removal.

[Nondaba🇿🇦 @ShweleNgelosi]

Msindisi🤣🙆‍♀️

[Mfundisi weQiniso @MfundisiQiniso]

@CrimeWatch_RSA @kingmoss0 Eh banna a typical @MYANC academic fraud like @MabuyaneOscar

[Bodycam Cop @BodycamCops2sx]

#cops #police #policeofficer

[MAGA Cult Slayer @MAGACult2]

🚨 SECRET CONGRESSIONAL MEETING: Just a few hours ago, Congress held special secret commission meeting away from the public’s eye to cut your Social Security.

WE. TOLD. YOU. SO.

Bless this man for blowing the 😗

[Matshaya, Doyi @Maliqo]

I once said this with my poor English they laughed. Now they are hearing it from expects on #MadlangaCommission they pretend to be shocked. We can't run a country without understanding computer software. https://t.co/7AsUezJjN0

[George @GeorgeKemptonPa]

@joelpollak Absolutely bullshit...

[Thando @Ta_Fitty]

Marco Jansen what have you done????

[George @GeorgeKemptonPa]

@LCabonena Begging?

[George @GeorgeKemptonPa]

@mbazZzo @MzwaneleManyi @MbalulaFikile @MYANC @PresidencyZA @CyrilRamaphosa ...and Cyril has nothing to lose (except accounting for killing people in Marikana)... so he should act

[Mpho @mbazZzo]

@GeorgeKemptonPa @MzwaneleManyi @MbalulaFikile @MYANC @PresidencyZA @CyrilRamaphosa please gather the NEC and charge @MbalulaFikile

[⭐⭐Tshepiso- DOUBLE CAF CHAMPION @Tshepi_11_]

Cardoso Ball at its best

[redge @redgenkosi]

A day after a rate decision, watch what the coverage does with it. Yesterday's hike was converted, within hours, into a personal finance story.

The template is familiar. What it costs you on a R2 million bond. Whether to fix your rate. A reassuring quote, in this case from the chief executive of a mortgage origination group, who described the increase as "a precautionary measure" and noted that prime, now 10.75%, "remains below the levels seen in 2023, when it reached 11.75%."

Three things happen in that translation, and they are worth naming.

First, a macroeconomic decision becomes a household budgeting problem. The question stops being whether restriction is the right response to an oil shock and becomes how you, personally, should absorb it. A political-economy choice is reframed as weather.

Second, the sources are interested parties. A mortgage originator has an obvious stake in homebuyers not panicking. That does not make the man wrong, but it is not neutral commentary, and it is presented as such.

Third, the arithmetic slips. One widely circulated figure put the cost of this hike at "about R1 360 a month" on a R2 million bond. The correct number for 25 basis points over twenty years is roughly R337, R1 360 is about what a full percentage point costs. Either that figure is wrong or it is cumulative across several hikes, and the report does not say which. When a public is being taught what to worry about, the order of magnitude is not a detail.

And here is what almost no one led with. In the same quarter the Bank is responding to, gross fixed capital formation fell 0.2%, the second consecutive quarterly decline, with private business and public corporations both cutting, and construction works and transport equipment the largest negative contributors.

Investment is falling. The Bank has just raised the price of capital. That is the story, and it was buried under bond repayment tables.

[Dikela @PrinceDikela]

Mchunu's defender..