South African rand weaker as markets await tariff, local government news

JOHANNESBURG, April 17 (Reuters) - South Africa's rand weakened early on Thursday against a firmer dollar, as markets awaited information on U.S. tariffs and local investors looked for news on the future of the coalition government.
At 0635 GMT, the rand traded at 18.8550 against the U.S. dollar , about 0.2% weaker than its previous close.
The dollar last traded about 0.3% stronger against a basket of currencies.
"Ahead of the Easter long weekend, investors will be reluctant to take on any significant market position. There are so many daily changes that doing so would be risky," ETM Analytics said in a research note.
U.S. President Donald Trump met with Japanese officials on Wednesday, in one of the first rounds of face-to-face talks since his tariffs on most countries roiled markets and stoked recession fears.
Markets were also processing comments from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, who warned of the risk of slowing growth and rising prices due to tariffs.
Like other risk-sensitive currencies, the rand takes direction from global drivers such as U.S. economic policy in addition to domestic factors.
Local investors will eye developments around a budget stand-off between the two biggest parties in the coalition government, the African National Congress (ANC) and the Democratic Alliance (DA), over a proposed value-added tax (VAT) hike on May 1.
The pro-business DA voted against the budget's fiscal framework in parliament and is challenging the VAT hike in court, raising concerns among investors over the stability of the coalition government.
"All of (South Africa's) domestic political developments are not taking place in isolation. On the contrary, if left unresolved, they may compound an already uncertain international environment," ETM Analytics said.
"The ZAR is therefore expected to trade cautiously with one eye on local developments and the other on the performance of the USD."
South Africa's benchmark 2030 government bond was firmer in early deals, with the yield down 2 basis points to 9.16%.

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Western Telegraph

10 minutes ago

• Western Telegraph

Diplomacy not an option, warns Iran after US attacks key nuclear sites

Abbas Araghchi said while the 'door to diplomacy' should always be open, 'this is not the case right now'. The United States attacked three sites in Iran overnight, inserting itself into Israel's war aimed at destroying the country's nuclear programme, and President Donald Trump claimed the facilities had been 'completely and fully obliterated'. The Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran confirmed attacks took place on its Fordo, Isfahan and Natanz sites, but it insisted its nuclear programme will not be stopped. Mr Araghchi said: 'The warmongering, lawless administration in Washington is solely and fully responsible for the dangerous consequences and far reaching implications of its act of aggression.' He said 'there is no red line' that the US has not crossed, adding: 'The most dangerous one was what happened only last night when they crossed a very big red line by attacking nuclear facilities only.' Satellite images taken on Sunday show damage to the mountainside at the underground site at Fordo. The images, by Planet Labs PBC, show the once-brown mountain now has parts turned grey and its contours appear slightly different than in previous images, suggesting a blast threw up debris around the site. That suggests the use of specialised American bunker-buster bombs on the facility. Light grey smoke also hung in the air. Iran and the UN nuclear watchdog said there were no immediate signs of radioactive contamination at the three locations following the strikes. It is not clear whether the US will continue attacking Iran alongside its ally Israel, which has been engaged in a nine-day war with Iran. Iran targeted Tel Aviv with missiles in the hours after the US attack (Oded Balilty/AP) Mr Trump acted without congressional authorisation, and he warned there will be additional strikes if Tehran retaliates against US forces. 'There will either be peace or there will be tragedy for Iran,' he said. Iran's foreign ministry said Washington had 'betrayed diplomacy' with the military strikes, and that 'the US has itself launched a dangerous war against Iran'. Its statement added: 'The Islamic Republic of Iran reserves its right to resist with full force against US military aggression and the crimes committed by this rogue regime, and to defend Iran's security and national interests.' Hours after the American attacks, Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard said it launched a barrage of 40 missiles at Israel, including its Khorramshahr-4, which can carry multiple warheads. Israeli authorities reported that more than 80 people suffered mostly minor injuries, though one multi-storey building in Tel Aviv was significantly damaged, with its entire facade torn away to expose the apartments inside. Houses across the street were almost completely destroyed. Following the Iranian barrage, Israel's military said it had 'swiftly neutralised' the Iranian missile launchers that had fired, and that it had begun a series of strikes towards military targets in western Iran. President Donald Trump addressed the nation from the White House following the air strikes (Carlos Barria/pool/AP) Iran has maintained its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes only, and US intelligence agencies have assessed that Tehran is not actively pursuing a bomb. However, Mr Trump and Israeli leaders have argued Iran could quickly assemble a nuclear weapon, making it an imminent threat. The decision to directly involve the US in the war comes after more than a week of strikes by Israel that significantly degraded Iran's air defences and offensive missile capabilities, and damaged its nuclear enrichment facilities. But US and Israeli officials have said American B-2 stealth bombers and the 30,000-pound bunker-buster bomb that only they have been configured to carry offered the best chance of destroying heavily fortified sites connected to the Iranian nuclear programme buried deep underground. Mr Trump appears to have made the calculation – at the prodding of Israeli officials and many Republicans – that Israel's operation had softened the ground and presented a perhaps unparalleled opportunity to set back Iran's nuclear programme, perhaps permanently. 'We have completed our very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran, including Fordo, Natanz, and Esfahan,' Mr Trump said in a post on social media. 'All planes are now outside of Iran air space. A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Fordo. All planes are safely on their way home.' Mr Trump later added: 'This is an HISTORIC MOMENT FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, ISRAEL, AND THE WORLD. IRAN MUST NOW AGREE TO END THIS WAR. THANK YOU!' Israel announced on Sunday that it had closed its airspace to both inbound and outbound flights in the wake of the US attacks. US officials said the attack used bunker-buster bombs on Iran's Fordo nuclear fuel enrichment plant, while submarines launched about 30 Tomahawk missiles. The decision to attack was a risky one for Mr Trump, who won the White House partially on the promise of keeping America out of costly foreign conflicts and scoffed at the value of American interventionism. But he has vowed he will not allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon and he had initially hoped the threat of force would bring the country's leaders to give up its nuclear programme peacefully.

Telegraph

10 minutes ago

• Telegraph

Starmer has made Britain utterly irrelevant

Two weeks is a short time in politics. In a bid to halt Israel's bombing campaign in Iran, Foreign Secretary David Lammy flew to Washington DC on Friday. Following meetings with secretary of state Marco Rubio and Donald Trump's Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff to discuss 'how a deal could avoid a deepening conflict', Lammy emerged to declare: 'A window now exists within the next two weeks to achieve a diplomatic solution.' Less than 48 hours later, Iran's uranium enrichment and nuclear technology facilities are in smoulders. Far from two weeks to negotiate, there were two days until the bombs went off. Donald Trump's decision to target the sites in Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan has shaken the regime in Tehran, but the tremors extend far beyond the Islamic Republic. The US president has demonstrated in emphatic fashion exactly what he thinks of the UK Government and the people who lead it. Just three days ago, Keir Starmer said that while a nuclear Iran was a major threat, it was 'better dealt with by way of negotiation than by way of conflict' and that 'we need to de-escalate'. It is being briefed that the UK took no part in the overnight bombing – boasting of your bystander status as a new world order is being born is certainly a choice – and that the Prime Minister was informed in advance. That latter crumb-searching looks especially pitiful. If there was a relationship between Trump's White House and Number 10, beyond the formal and functional, the administration would not have allowed Starmer to embarrass himself by giving on-the-record quotes about the risks of a course of action the president was days away from taking. Starmer and Lammy favoured yet more talks with Tehran, a regime that demonstrated with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that it regards negotiations and even agreements as a stalling tactic to gull naive Western leaders while its nuclear ambitions continue unabated. There are few leaders as naive as Starmer and Lammy, two men keenly interested in foreign and military affairs but fantastically out of their depth in both. If the UK has been swept aside in Trump's decision to hit Iran, it is not the US president but Britain's own Prime Minister who has made his nation irrelevant. It makes little sense to speak of a Starmer foreign policy, for Starmer's policy is merely a copy and paste of the various positions of the European Union. But the world does not belong to the likes of Ursula von der Leyen, Friedrich Merz or Emmanuel Macron anymore, and it certainly does not belong to their eager echoes Starmer and Lammy. Israel and the United States have not only exploded Iran's nuclear capabilities; they have blown to smithereens the delusions of liberal multilateralism. Those delusions appeal to Starmer because they regard negotiation as an end in itself, rather than a means to achieving an outcome. They are about process, and if there is anything the Prime Minister believes in, its process. Process is always the answer, even when it does not work, because process is the god of lawyers. The god of lawyers is dead, at least on the international stage. Peace through strength is back, with the United States and Israel in its vanguard.

New Statesman​

14 minutes ago

• New Statesman​

How Benjamin Netanyahu beat America First

'Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace,' Donald Trump told the world from inside the White House last night. Earlier that day, B-2 bombers had dropped their bunker-busting payloads on three Iranian nuclear facilities, marking America's entrance into the conflict between Israel and Iran. This is not peace through strength, but peace through war. What happens now depends on the Iranian response. Trump's gamble seems to be that the attack will force a vulnerable Iran to negotiate (which they were doing before Israel assassinated their chief negotiator) because the mullahs know a long bombing campaign risks bringing down the regime itself. But that would mean Ayatollah Khamanei accepting the humiliation of bowing to American power. The alternative is to attack. The 40,000 American troops in the Middle East have been told to prepare for retaliation. The Iranians could also hike the price of oil by attempting to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 per cent of the world's supply passes. That is why Trump wants this to be the end. Escalation puts his administration's core purpose at risk. The neoconservative mind assumes that America can be insulated from its foreign wars. In contrast, America First sees war as inexorably linked to, and inevitably bad for, Washington's appetite to put Americans first. Hence Maga isolationists have spent the past two weeks lobbying against any strikes. Where is that dissent now? Charlie Kirk, the online Maga influencer, posted: 'America stands with President Trump'. JD Vance stood beside the president as he gave his speech, even as Reuters reported earlier on Saturday that the vice president told senior Israeli officials that the US should not be directly involved in the conflict and that Israel was going to drag the US into the war. The lesson here is that loyalty to the Maga leader sits beneath any moral or strategic gripes someone in Maga might have with the president's decisions. That dissent is rare means the Democrats can take up the anti-war mantle. Bernie Sanders read out news of the attack at a rally yesterday. The crowd erupted into the chant: 'No more war'. 'It is so grossly unconstitutional,' Sanders said, 'the president does not have the right'. Sanders is correct: bombing a sovereign country is a declaration of war, a power that the constitution reserves to Congress. President Trump did not put much effort into winning over the public. Where were the interviews making the case for war? Persuasion was substituted by his own public musings as to whether he would give the order, which is illuminating because it suggests he sees war as something waged by himself alone, and not the nation as a whole. His nationalism, in other words, sits beneath his ego. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe It feels almost quaint to talk about the United Nations in 2025, but Trump has reduced those institutions designed to stop one country forcefully imposing its will on another to farce. Similar disregard for the UN in 2003 was at least accompanied by the pretence – at least partly down to the diplomatic efforts of Tony Blair throughout 2002 – that Bush cared enough about international opinion to enlist Colin Powell to plead the case at the Security Council. That pretence has been read its last rites. The President has not even tried to justify the strike in terms of self-defence. The Labour government has said it supports the strikes, despite pushing diplomacy as the only appropriate course of action beforehand, raising the question: do they support the ends without the means, or do they now support the action simply because it has happened? That call for diplomacy now looks quixotic. Trump is a practitioner of power, not words. As he said this week, 'Europe is not going to be able to help in this'. The timeline of events leading up to Saturday's strike punctures the idea that this was Trump's plan all along. In May he asked Netanyahu not to strike Iran so that negotiations could take place. But once Netanyahu ignored him, Trump's pure machismo need to be in on the action meant he forgave the snub and sent a fleet of B-2 bombers to Iran. The Israelis were reportedly told about yesterday's strike beforehand, and Trump even thanked Netanyahu personally in his White House speech. If international law and diplomacy has lost, Netanyahu has won. He once again judged correctly that America would follow where he led. Remember Joe Biden's 'redline' over Rafah? Netanyahu invaded anyway. The alliance endured. Clearly it still does. [Further reading: Where have all the anti-war Democrats gone?] Related