Category: Thought Leaders
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Ian Bremmer on BizNews: Trump is sabotaging his own party’s re-election chances
US President Donald Trump faces the November midterms with historically low approval ratings, worse than any second-term president in 80 years bar Richard Nixon. Rather than shoring up support, Trump has pushed loyalist candidates over stronger incumbents, clashed with his own party’s leadership and focused on personal projects instead of inflation. Analyst Ian Bremmer argues…
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Dr Frans Cronjé: Why the ANC now polls at 34%, and what it means for SA
This article was first published by The Common Sense Two years into the Government of National Unity, new SRF/Victory Research/The Common Sense polling shows the ANC has slumped to 34.0% nationally — near its post-VAT-crisis low — while sitting below 20% in Johannesburg, where a rival ANC/EFF/MK bloc governs in practice. The DA holds steady at…
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WSM: Remembering Bill (RW) Johnson
This article was first published by PoliticsWeb He predicted ANC decline when the rest of the world was still cheering the Rainbow Nation, and it cost him his place in South African journalism for years. William Saunderson-Meyer looks back on a 40-year friendship with RW Johnson, the Durban-born, Oxford-trained political scientist who died this week…
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Anthea Jeffery: SA wants offshore oil, but government’s own rules will scare investors to Namibia
South Africa has just 13 days of fuel in reserve, and the government wants to fix that by unlocking offshore oil and gas worth potentially decades of domestic supply. But the new Upstream Petroleum Resources Development Act asks investors to hand over 20% to the state plus 10% to black South Africans, against Namibia’s far…
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Nouriel Roubini on BizNews: Gulf tensions simmer, but oil shocks aren’t what they were in the 1970s
Nouriel Roubini argues that even as tensions over the Strait of Hormuz simmer unresolved, oil shocks have lost their power to derail economies the way they did in the 1970s. Strategic reserves, energy efficiency gains, OPEC discipline breakdowns and the AI investment boom have all blunted the impact, he writes. For South Africa, a net…
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TCS editors: How to tell when you’re being fed a narrative by the media
This article was first published by The Common Sense Using the SARS “rogue unit” saga as its case study, The Common Sense’s editorial board sets out six ways to protect yourself from information operations — coordinated efforts to distort public perception and justify action against a target. The advice: don’t be naïve about institutional corruption, ask…
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Tim O’Reilly: Elon Musk is building a brand of capitalism Adam Smith would hate
Elon Musk, born in Pretoria and long associated with his South African roots, has built an empire that inverts the very system meant to restrain it. In this essay for The Economist, Irish-born American author, publisher and entrepreneur Tim O’Reilly argues that Musk’s SpaceX listing gave him roughly 85% of voting power while stripping investors…
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Marika Sboros: Inside SA’s Ozempic copycat case exposing “Fat Drug” free-for-all
This is the second piece published through BizNews’s Commissioning Fund – a mechanism that lets us pay top-tier writers properly for the time and scrutiny a story like this demands. Unfortunately, the brutal economics of online publishing prevent articles like this from being done. Investigative journalist Marika Sboros, best known for her books and expose’s…
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When the migrants go: Katzenellenbogen on the economic shock SA isn’t ready for
June 30th has come and gone. The anti-illegal immigration deadline set by groups like March and March triggered mass fear, chaotic departure scenes, and a R600-million government security operation. Now comes the harder question: what does SA’s economy look like without its migrants? Analyst Jonathan Katzenellenbogen, writing for The Daily Friend, counts the costs —…
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Prof Diane Coyle on BizNews: Manchester’s mayoral miracle playbook could remake Britain
Andy Burnham’s near-decade running Greater Manchester has produced the UK’s fastest-growing regional economy outside London — and now, with Keir Starmer’s resignation opening the door to a Burnham premiership, the world wants to know how he did it. Cambridge economist Diane Coyle, who helped architect the Manchester strategy through two independent economic reviews, identifies the…
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Martin Wolf: America’s 250th birthday finds it dismantling the world order it built
Martin Wolf’s sweeping essay for our partners at The Financial Times traces the arc of American hegemony — from industrial superpower to undisputed post-Cold War victor — and asks how the triumph unravelled so fast. His answer: China’s rise, the digital revolution, and right-wing populism have combined to shatter the unipolar moment within just 35…
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Should your graduate child spend the next decade in SA or America? An economist does the maths — and it’s brutal
Economist Dr Chris Kotze strips the SA-versus-America emigration debate of its emotion and runs the numbers. His finding: South Africa is cheaper in nominal terms but significantly less affordable in the metric that matters — working-time cost. A representative monthly basket requires 143 hours of work from an American graduate but 185 hours from a…
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Hersov to Mantashe: Fix mining or forfeit SA’s future
Rob Hersov pulls no punches in this open letter to Minerals Minister Gwede Mantashe, framing South Africa’s mining collapse as a policy crime rather than a geological misfortune. Gold output down 86%. GDP contribution halved. 300,000 jobs gone. Exploration spending in freefall. And the Fraser Institute now ranks us below military junta-run states as a…
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Jim O’Neill on BizNews asking the question markets don’t want to answer
Marking the launch of BRICS+ Thinking, Jim O’Neill reflects on new research assessing the performance of BRICS economies against projections made when the BRIC concept was first introduced 25 years ago. The analysis shows that China and India significantly exceeded expectations, offsetting weaker outcomes in Brazil, Russia, and South Africa. O’Neill also highlights the continued…
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Stephen Roach on BizNews: Reading between China’s red lines on Taiwan
Key topics: Xi warns Taiwan is key red line in US-China relations “Red-line inflation” risks miscommunication and conflict US and China’s vague red lines weaken diplomatic credibility By Stephen S. Roach* NEW HAVEN—Chinese President Xi Jinping sent an unmistakably tough message on Taiwan to US President Donald Trump during their recent summit in Beijing. Xi…