Latest news with #Anglo-American
USA Today
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- USA Today
When does Season 2 of 'The Buccaneers' come out? Date, cast, where to watch regal drama
When does Season 2 of 'The Buccaneers' come out? Date, cast, where to watch regal drama Show Caption Hide Caption Need a show to binge? These are the must watch shows this summer USA TODAY's TV critic Kelly Lawler breaks down the best TV shows you don't to want to miss this summer The Anglo-American cultural clash continues, but "The Buccaneers" are no longer the invaders. In Season 2 of Apple TV+'s regal drama, "The Buccaneers," a group of feisty young American girls, who "exploded into the tightly corseted London of the 1870s, setting hearts racing and kicking off an Anglo-American culture clash" in Season 1 now call England is their home and are in fact "practically running the place." "Last time we got a taste of England. This time we're in for a veritable feast," says Apple TV+ about the upcoming season, adding the next chapter will explore "sisterhood, romance, wit, steamy love affairs, extravagant gowns, spectacular landscapes and jaw-dropping plot twists," against the backdrop of musical hits by Chappell Roan, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Sabrina Carpenter, Gracie Abrams, and The Last Dinner Party among others. Here's what to know about Season 2 of "The Buccaneers," including the release date, cast and trailer. Watch 'The Buccaneers' on Apple TV+ Join our Watch Party! Sign up to receive USA TODAY's movie and TV recommendations right in your inbox When does 'The Buccaneers' Season 2 come out? Season 2 of "The Buccaneers" will premiere on Wednesday, June 18 on Apple TV+. The streaming service did not specify what time the episode will be available on the platform. Earlier when Season 2 of "Severance" released, Apple TV+, in an emailed statement to USA TODAY, said that since it is a global streaming service and not a linear network, it does not promote exact tune-in times week-to-week. Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle. How to watch 'The Buccaneers' Season 2 "The Buccaneers" Season 2 will be available to stream on Apple TV+ starting Wednesday, June 18. New episodes will drop weekly on Wednesdays. Seasons 1 of "The Buccaneers" are also available to stream on Apple TV+. Watch 'The Buccaneers' on Apple TV+ Do you need an Apple TV+ subscription to watch 'The Buccaneers'? Yes, viewers need an Apple TV+ subscription to watch "The Buccaneers." An Apple TV+ subscription is $9.99 per month, after a seven-day free trial. How many episodes will 'The Buccaneers' Season 2 have? Season 2 of 'The Buccaneers' will have eight episodes, with new episodes dropping weekly on Wednesdays. Here's what the episode schedule looks like: Episode 1 / Season Premiere: June 18 Episode 2: June 25 Episode 3: July 2 Episode 4: July 9 Episode 5: July 16 Episode 6: July 23 Episode 7: July 30 Episode 8 / Season Finale: Aug. 6 'The Buccaneers' Season 2 cast Season 2 of "The Buccaneers" welcomes a mix of new and old cast members, including: Kristine Frøseth Alisha Boe Aubri Ibrag Josie Totah Imogen Waterhouse Mia Threapleton Christina Hendricks Guy Remmers Matthew Broome Josh Dylan Barney Fishwick Amelia Bullmore Fenella Woolgar New cast members include: Leighton Meester Greg Wise Jacob Ifan Grace Ambrose Maria Almeida Watch the 'The Buccaneers' Season 2 trailer We occasionally recommend interesting products and services. If you make a purchase by clicking one of the links, we may earn an affiliate fee. USA TODAY Network newsrooms operate independently, and this doesn't influence our coverage. Saman Shafiq is a trending news reporter for USA TODAY. Reach her at sshafiq@ and follow her on X and Instagram @saman_shafiq7.
Time Out
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Stereophonic
Stereophonic playwright David Adjmi recently wrote an article for a major British newspaper in which he waxed effusively about how his Broadway smash had been inspired by the band Led Zeppelin. I wonder if his lawyer was holding a gun to his head as he wrote it, because while the Zep may have been a tertiary influence, Stereophonic is very very very very very very very clearly about Fleetwood Mac. There are Fleetwood Mac fan conventions less about Fleetwood Mac. Hell, there are incarnations of Fleetwood Mac that have been less about Fleetwood Mac. Specifically, it's a lightly fictionalised account of the recording of the Anglo-American band's mega-selling Rumours album, and while not every detail is the same, many are identical, from the cities it was recorded in (Sausalito then LA) to the gender, nationality and internal-relationship makeup of the band, to details like female members 'Holly' (aka Christine McVie) and 'Diana' (aka Stevie Nicks) moving out out the studio accommodation they were sharing with the band's menfolk in favour of their own condominiums. Which l hasten to say is all to the good, even if it frequently feels like a miracle that Stereophonic has stormed Broadway – becoming the most Tony-nominated play of all time – without being derailed by legal issues (though there is a lawsuit against it from Rumours producer Ken Caillet, who has accused Adjmi of ripping off his memoir). Of course, it is a great subject for a play. The story of how erstwhile blues noodlers Fleetwood Mac recorded one of the greatest pop albums in history, while breaking up with each other, while on drugs isn't simply a bit of pop trivia: it's a parable on the nature of the creative process. It's an incredibly tricky story to tell in a way that doesn't come across all VH1 Behind the Music. But Stereophonic carries it off spectacularly well. For starters, the veil of fiction allows Adjmi to portray Peter (Jack Riffiford, basically Lindsay Buckingham) and Reg (Zachary Hart, basically John McVie) as catastrophic fuck ups - the former toxic and controlling, the latter addled and out of control. The reason biographical musicals are uniformly terrible is that the musicians or their estate have to sign the content off before they'll allow their songs to be used, resulting in tediously flattering portraits. That does not happen here. For all their faults it's a pleasure spending time with these fuck ups And then there are the songs by erstwhile Arcade Fire man Will Butler. They don't sound anything like Fleetwood Mac really: at a pinch you could argue they sound like Arcade Fire gone '70s soft rock. The lyrics don't have the stinging rawness of Rumours – it would be clunky cosplay to try and write a song like 'Go Your Own Way' for this project. But they're rousing, emotional, layered tunes, written for a band with the same makeup of singers and instrumentalists as Fleetwood Mac, performed live by the cast. There's a notable scene in which the band go through endless takes of a track called 'Masquerade': spoiler etc, but the scene finally ends with them getting it right – the scene would fall flat if it wasn't a good song. So no, Butler hasn't written Rumours II, or even tried. But Daniel Aukin's production hinges on the songs written for it being good enough to feel credible, which is pretty audacious. Structurally, it's a three-and-a-bit-hour interrogation of the creative process that features little more than the band chatting to each other or recording. Set solely in a windowless studio, director Aukin has supreme confidence in the play's pacing and rhythms. There is a lot – like a lot – of fannying around over drum sounds and guitar tones, but the play leads us to the right psychological space to understand that there's much more to this than musos muso-ing. A blizzard of coke, exhaustion, the enormous pressure to follow up their previous album, and of course cataclysmic inter-band tensions all go some way to explain why the band and their affable engineers Grover (Eli Gelb) and Charlie (Andrew R Butler) find themselves agonising over every detail. There is a lot about gender and power here. If the broad brushstroke picture is 'band makes an album', the more nuanced one is 'two talented women try to assert themselves in a toxic male-dominated creative environment'. Both Holly (Nia Towle) and Diana (Lucy Karczewski) know their worth. But Holly has to negotiate the broken heart of her ex, Reg, who has pretty much fallen apart after she dumped him and needs to be looked after if they're actually going to make this record. Meanwhile Diana has to deal with the brittle, self-absorbed musical virtuoso Peter, who she's still in a relationship with. His natural sense of perfectionism has been curdled by resentment over Diana's rising star status in the band, and his many snarling putdowns of her work are deeply uncomfortable. Zoom in even closer, and it's the story of Diana stepping out from Peter's control – at the beginning she's subservient to him for the sake of keeping the peace, but she will soon reject this volcanically. It's worth stressing that Stereophonic is extremely entertaining, because it's a show about seven great characters, and the reason the characters are so great is largely because the IRL Fleetwood Mac are a great bunch of characters. For all their faults it's a pleasure spending time with these fuck ups, from Towle's tough, brassy Holly to Chris Stack's avuncular-but-edgy Simon (ie the Mick Fleetwood character). Knob twiddlers Grover and Charlie aren't based on famous people, but still counterbalance the story, a couple of guys who might have expected themselves to be out of their depth musically instead finding themselves totally stumped by the band's emotional problems If there's one thing beyond a degree of legal protection that Stereophonic obviously gains from not technically being about Fleetwood Mac, it's that it ends on a genuinely uncertain note, and not with, I dunno, the band slamming through 'The Chain' while stats about the album's colossal sales flash up. Was this tectonic creative process worth all the damage inflicted for the music it created? Rumours is so beloved now that it's hard to conclude the band should have actually sacked it off. And you'd probably say the same for the Stereophonic band to be honest. But without the quadrillions of sales and instantly recognisable tunes, the damage these people did to each other in the name of art is brought home with devastating eloquence.
Daily Record
15-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
Scottish mansion once home to Queen's exiled Governess now on the market for £1.5m
Marion 'Crawfie' Crawford was exiled from royal circles after revealing palace secrets in her memoir A grand Aberdeen mansion linked to one of the Royal Family's most controversial betrayals has hit the market for offers over £1.5 million. The nine-bedroom property on 60 Rubislaw Den South was once home to Marion 'Crawfie' Crawford, the former Governess to Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret, who was famously exiled from royal circles after sharing details of palace life in a tell-all memoir. Crawfie and her husband, Major George Buthlay, purchased the mansion after being evicted from Nottingham Cottage, once their lifetime gift from the royals, following the publication of The Little Princesses. The lucrative memoir offered an insider's glimpse into royal childhood and netted her around $85,000 at the time, a figure worth millions today. Once beloved and trusted, Crawford played a crucial role in the young princesses' lives, becoming a confidante and constant companion during a period of upheaval that included the abdication crisis, the accession of their father King George VI, and the Second World War. During Luftwaffe bombings, she even took shelter with the girls in Windsor Castle's dungeons. The Queen reportedly ran to tell Crawford about her budding romance with Prince Philip. But everything changed when The Little Princesses, originally serialised in Ladies' Home Journal and Woman's Own, hit the shelves. Her accounts included charming but unauthorised anecdotes, such as tipping ink over her own head in frustration and the young princesses pinching their dog to make it bark down a transatlantic phone line. The backlash was swift and brutal. 'Doing a Crawfie' became royal shorthand for betrayal. The Queen Mother allegedly ordered that no one speak to her again and instructed that any letters from Crawford to the Palace be burned. Yet the story is more complicated than it seems. The series had reportedly been part of a Palace-approved plan to improve Anglo-American relations, brokered via the Foreign Office. American editor Beatrice Blackmar Gould had met with the Queen Mother and Princess Elizabeth to discuss a royal series, and it was later agreed a member of staff would be interviewed. The Queen Mother suggested court correspondent Dermot Morrah write the articles based on interviews with Crawford, assuring her participation was permitted, as long as her name was not used. But when Gould convinced Crawford to allow her by-line to be included, it all fell apart. 'It was clear she was asked by the Palace to write the articles. Join the Daily Record WhatsApp community! Get the latest news sent straight to your messages by joining our WhatsApp community today. You'll receive daily updates on breaking news as well as the top headlines across Scotland. No one will be able to see who is signed up and no one can send messages except the Daily Record team. All you have to do is click here if you're on mobile, select 'Join Community' and you're in! If you're on a desktop, simply scan the QR code above with your phone and click 'Join Community'. We also treat our community members to special offers, promotions, and adverts from us and our partners. If you don't like our community, you can check out any time you like. To leave our community click on the name at the top of your screen and choose 'exit group'. If you're curious, you can read our Privacy Notice. Then, they made an example of her and cast her aside,' said friend Nigel Astell. 'Crawfie was devastated and completely heartbroken by what they did to her.' Despite the storm around her, the public response to the memoir was positive. Palace insiders even welcomed magazine editors for tea, celebrating the favourable PR, while the woman at the centre of it all was shunned. Crawfie, originally from Dunfermline and trained at Edinburgh's Moray House, was handpicked at just 22 by the Duke and Duchess of York to educate their daughters. She postponed her own marriage by eight years to remain in royal service, finally retiring in 1949 when Princess Margaret graduated from the schoolroom at age 18.
The Print
11-06-2025
- Politics
- The Print
Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric is tearing LA apart—a city built by Mexican settlers in 1781
For all societies and nations, some conversations are excruciating: Who can truly claim to belong, and who is consigned to the margins? Whose values and beliefs ought to prevail? Each city, each community, and each nation has deeply internalised scripts to which it turns in moments of crisis. Flying the flags of their homelands—Mexico, Uruguay, Paraguay, and America—the protesters are laying claim to the right to make decisions about their future. Last weekend, the world watched the global economic and cultural powerhouse Los Angeles burning in response to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency's raids targeting 'illegal' immigrant workers. Trump's incendiary language against immigrants has won him support in swathes of his White American base, but it has also pushed many other communities to the edge. From the very first nights, the residents of Los Angeles smelled the fear, billowing in with the summer mist. Lacking a substantial troop presence in the south of California, the state's new Anglo-American rulers were concerned that Mexicans would rebel and reunite with their homeland. Late at night, drunken young Hispanic men would gallop through the streets, proclaiming rebellion. Elderly Hispanic men would tell stories of how they conspired to overthrow unpopular governors. The new Anglo-American rulers were—nervous. To understand what's going on requires engagement with the fact that the riot is not a new phenomenon in Los Angeles or other American cities. Each riot poses discomfiting questions about the place of communities in the social order. The riot almost always establishes new rules, new accommodations, and new resentments. Each riot is a painful engagement in testing who can claim to be a citizen, a full participant in its culture, and with a voice in shaping its destiny. Also read: The most tragic legacy of 9/11 is a West that wants to repaint itself white Neighbours, not friends The names of the streets tell us an important story about Los Angeles: To the north of the concrete detention centre where hundreds of illegal immigrants are being held, there is the El Pueblo monument, where 44 families from the Gulf of Mexico first settled in 1781 on the orders of their king, Charles III of Spain—founding Los Angeles. To the south of the prison, there's Little Tokyo, and a short walk away, Skid Row, home to the desperately poor. The buildings bear the names of radical Hispanic civil rights leaders and the great Anglo families who built Los Angeles. A little under two million of the city's population are Hispanic, according to census figures, some with ties of kinship and culture to communities across the border. There are 1,126,052 Whites. Additionally, there are 462,643 Asians and 336,096 Black or African American residents. This is one of America's many racial crucibles. Following the coerced sale of California to the United States in 1847, Sonora Town began to develop as a Hispanic ghetto made up of miners kicked off gold mines by Anglo-American prospectors. Lawless bandits from the region also started to congregate in the El Calle de los Negros neighbourhood. 'Filled with saloons and brothels, this street catered to the less reputable members of all races,' historian Lawrence Guillow records. To most residents, it was evident some kind of violent showdown was inevitable. Then, on 19 July 1856, marshals attempted to confiscate a guitar and other personal property from Antonio Ruiz and Señora María Candelaria Pollorena to recover an unpaid loan. A fight followed, and Ruiz ended up being shot dead in the chest. A trial followed, in which an all-White jury acquitted the killer. For several days, gangs of Hispanic vigilantes clashed with the local police—though to little effect. The rioting soon died out, with influential Hispanic leaders seeing that the chaos was undermining their status in Los Angeles. Even as the crisis of 1856 began to subside, a new one was starting to emerge. Thousands of ethnic-Chinese migrant workers began to make their way into the city, congregating seven to a room in the Calle de Los Negros. The New York Times reported: 'Murderers, horse-thieves, highwaymen, burglars, etc., from all parts of Southern California and Arizona, make this their rendezvous. It is their brothels monopolising about two-thirds of an entire block.' Late in 1871, members of two Chinese crime gangs—the Howg Chow and Nin Yung—began exchanging gunfire in the Calle de Los Negros. Furious retaliation followed from Hispanic and White residents. Five hundred Chinese people, historian Scott Zesch records, were dragged through the streets and shot, hanged, and beaten to death as the crowd fancied. Eighteen were killed. 'A delighted hangman, dancing a quick step on a balcony, called out, 'Bring me more Chinamen boys, patronise the home trade,'' Zesch writes. Through the period, American legal institutions struggled to establish themselves: Vigilantism held up some degree of order, if not law. 'The Americans of the Angel City were in the habit of amusing themselves by hanging some luckless Mexican, and the Mexicans wished to show that they could play the same game and so seized on poor Dave as a fit subject for demonstration.' Also read: Seattle caste ban isn't about Hinduism or Indians. It's America's Great Culture War From war to civil war The summer of 1943 brought large numbers of soldiers—recruited from across the United States' conservative rural heartland—into contact with Los Angeles' complex culture. That June, hundreds of soldiers went on the rampage in East Los Angeles and downtown, beating up any young men they could find in fashionable zoot suits, part of the local counterculture. 'Streetcars were halted while Mexicans, and some Filipinos and Negroes, were jerked out of their seats, pushed into the streets and beaten with a sadistic frenzy,' a witness recorded. The police backed the attackers, historian Richard Griswold del Castillo writes. Even more violence lay ahead. The arrival of a new underclass—Black Americans—saw the community squeezed into overcrowded, substandard, and overpriced dwellings in south-central Los Angeles. The real estate market was rigged, scholar Robert Fogelson writes, to exclude Blacks from the wider property market for fear of lowering prices in exclusive White neighbourhoods. For Blacks, this meant their ghettos were places of confinement and subordination. The tinder soon caught light. In August 1965, a white California highway patrolman arrested a young Blackman for drunk driving in the Watts neighbourhood. His mother attempted to intervene, leading to a scuffle. Large crowds gathered and began stoning police vehicles. Fifteen people were killed in the Watts riots; over 1,000 were injured, and 4,000 were sent to jail. A study by political scientist Anthony Oberschall of arrested protesters showed their median educational achievements were above the norm.' Watts, Oberschall argues, was 'a large-scale collective action with a broad, representative base in the lower class Negro communities. Their frustrations included constant encounters with police brutality, as well as the lack of economic and educational opportunities built into their ghettos. The worst race riots came in 1992 when the acquittal of four white police officers for the murder of motorist Rodney King set off six days of intense violence. The context, scholars Judson Jeffries and Jerrell Beckham write, was again framed by large-scale police violence against Blacks. From 1962 to 1965, the Los Angeles Police Department shot dead 65 African-Americans, with just one case leading to the prosecution of an officer. There were large numbers of demonstrations that were simply ignored. Like now, the riots in south-central Los Angeles drew in not just Blacks but also groups of Hispanics and a smattering of whites. Though there was large-scale looting of Asian-owned businesses, interestingly, there was no Korean-on-Black communal violence. For the most part, the police withdrew its resources to protect more affluent parts of the city, leaving the Asian businesses to fend for themselves, historian King-Kok Cheung writes. Lessons in diversity Learning diversity is difficult for all societies—all the more so where communities are divided by economic status, cultural or religious beliefs, and geographical ghettoisation. Trump has reviled immigrants—infamously and falsely, claiming they were eating pet animals or suggesting Mexican illegal immigrants were rapists—in acid terms. Each of the communities he has reviled in the United States, though, makes up a significant percentage of the population. Like all American communities, they include criminals—but are also proud workers seeking to build an honourable future without losing a heritage they are proud of. That's why immigrant protesters in Los Angeles have flown the flags of their homelands—asserting this identity is as much part of the country's culture as the Italian flags routinely flown from restaurants or the Irish flags taken out in procession in Boston. Although Trump's incendiary political impulses have sparked off a crisis, it would be a mistake to assume that these tensions will fracture America. The most recent data available shows that one in six American newlyweds is of a different race, a remarkable change in a country where miscegenation was only ruled legal in 1967. Los Angeles' own story demonstrates that it is a city capable of accommodating great cultural diversity. Likely, cultural assimilation is America's future, not the white-chauvinist hatred Trump is attempting to sow. Hispanics played a significant role in Trump's rise, but their support is already waning, according to opinion polls. A long and painful period lies ahead, though, until a racially-transformed nation learns to live with its changed character. Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal. (Edited by Prashant)
Daily Maverick
09-06-2025
- Business
- Daily Maverick
Capital vs trade: The stark economic divide threatening South Africa's future prosperity
Dr Michael Power recently retired from Ninety One where he was the Global Strategist for most of the past two decades. He remains a Consultant to Ninety One. Prior to Ninety One, he had worked in London, South Africa and Kenya for Anglo-American, Rothschild, HSBC Equator and Barings. He has a PhD from UCT, a master's from the Fletcher School at Tufts and a bachelor's from Oxford. His primary focus today is doing research into the emerging field of geo-economics focussing in particular on the global implications of the return of the economic centre of gravity to a China-centred Asia. In an international context and given the type of factory jobs that our pool of unemployed labour would be qualified to undertake so they might manufacture products for export, most of our available labour reserve is currently priced out of the global wage hierarchy. Last month, under the series title 'Elegy of a Tragedy Foretold ', Daily Maverick kindly published my Ninety One swansong. Central to my thesis was that the US has become addicted to breathing the heady 'Atmosphere of Capital', a dependency that has correspondingly damaged US Inc's ability to participate meaningfully in the lower pressure of the 'Atmosphere of Trade'. Result? Severe damage has been inflicted on US Inc because of capital inflows hijacking the US dollar to a far higher level than would allow US Inc to prosper in that Atmosphere of Trade. In essence, the US has contracted a severe case of the Dutch Disease. But the American variant has resulted not through exporting a commodity like oil or gas, but through exporting its currency in the form of a US Treasury Bill. In a 2019 Financial Times opinion titled ' How to diagnose your own Dutch Disease ', Brendan Greeley noted that 'around 1980 the United States discovered that it was the Saudi Arabia of money'. (To understand my American thesis more fully, it might be useful for the reader to refer back to this five-part essay which can be found here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5.) The core of my proposition is that even as the US might appear to 'win' through its capital account surplus (65% of the MSCI's ACWI equities index is weighted towards the US), America is 'losing' through its trade deficit (65% of the world's current account deficits in 2024 were created by the US). Profoundly negative Structurally, America's trade deficit losses have had a profoundly negative effect on the economic framework and wellbeing of the US… as well as visibly poisoning American politics. Indeed, as was foretold in JD Vance's 2016 book 'Hillbilly Elegy ', the divisive political tragedy now playing out in America has its roots in this capital account rich/trade account poor paradox. It has occurred to me that South Africa might have suffered a not too dissimilar fate to the US. Have we also become a country where the capital tail wags the trade dog? Despite the standard definition, our variant of the Dutch Disease has not happened because South Africa — by being mostly a commodity exporter — has caught the original version of the Dutch Disease. That occurred when a high percentage of the Netherlands' exports and so trade account earnings were commodity-related; in the Dutch case, the infection was caused by North Sea gas. In the 1970s, when an oil and gas price bonanza dramatically drove up Dutch terms of trade, so dragging the value of the Dutch guilder considerably higher as well, the industrial export sectors of the Netherlands became uncompetitive, and deindustrialisation swiftly followed. South Africa's variant of the Dutch Disease is closer to that contracted by the US. Given the precarious economic status that a liberated South Africa inherited in 1994, our recurring and so structural current account deficit has meant that, were we to avoid a currency crisis, we needed to attract meaningful foreign money inflows via our capital account to offset our underlying trade and current account deficits. The inflows we attracted have not, to any material degree, been foreign direct investment (the FDI that builds factories, so creating jobs), but rather mostly foreign portfolio investment (the FPI directed at our equity and bond markets). And a material share of these FPI inflows went into Government Bonds to help fund South Africa's ongoing budget deficit. (This speaks to why maintaining South Africa's Sovereign Debt Rating as high as possible — it is currently BB- or BB2 — is such a sensitive issue for our Treasury and Reserve Bank.) Yet for SA Inc, these foreign portfolio investment inflows have very possibly distorted the South African rand's valuation in foreign exchange markets, keeping it materially higher than it would otherwise have been had the quantum of those inflows not been forthcoming. De-industrialisation As a result, since 1994 (or more precisely 1995 when South Africa joined GATT, now the WTO, thus removing what little remaining protection our domestic industries had against foreign competition), echoing what happened in the US, South Africa de-industrialised. (So keen were we back in 1995 to fall into line with GATT's provisions to 'open up' that South African industrialist Leslie Boyd bemoaned that we 'outGATTed GATT'!) So what has been the fallout? We now have probably the highest unemployment rate in the world. Each week The Economist publishes the key economic metrics of the top 42 countries in the world. South Africa's stated unemployment rate — 32.9% — is over three times the next highest country's rate: Spain with 10.9%. I have long maintained that, in an international context and given the type of factory jobs that our pool of unemployed labour would be qualified to undertake so they might manufacture products for export, most of our available labour reserve is currently priced out of the global wage hierarchy. Like for like, South African wage rates for semi-skilled labour, when measured in Bangladeshi taka or Sri Lankan rupees, are very uncompetitive. Our minimum wages rates are 2.3x those of Bangladesh and 4.2x those of Sri Lanka. I am sure most readers of Daily Maverick will find the consequences of my logic — that even if the South African rand is fairly valued by markets in the Atmosphere of Capital, it is significantly overvalued in the Atmosphere of Trade — hard to stomach. I know — having worked in South Africa's fund management community for more than 20 years where we lived, breathed and even spoke the language of the Atmosphere of Capital every day — many of my erstwhile colleagues take issue with the implications of my reasoning. (For every 20 opinions on why the rand 'should be stronger', there was only ever one opinion about how to reduce South Africa's unemployment!) But I fear this sharp difference of opinion only goes to highlight South Africa's two-tier economy: that stark division between our 'haves and the have nots'. This gulf gives us the highest wealth inequality (as measured by the Gini coefficient) in the world. It is telling that, in that same ranking, other rand monetary area nations, Namibia and Eswatini, rank 2nd and 4th respectively; Botswana — whose currency basket is estimated to have a 50% rand weighting — is 5th. At the risk of oversimplifying, we 'haves' prefer to breathe the Atmosphere of Capital. We benchmark our values — in both senses of the word 'value' — against Western metrics. Indeed, most of us seem largely unaware that there might be another 'atmospheric pressure' out there in today's world that other regions of the non-Western world breathe. (Perhaps we might encounter that 'thinner air' — that relative cheapness — were we to holiday in Kenya or Indonesia.) Economically relevant Still, most of South Africa's 'have nots' have no option but to stay tied up in the straitjacket of the Atmosphere of Capital when — if they were to stand a chance of being globally economically relevant by securing an export-oriented job — they should instead be allowed to breathe the Atmosphere of Trade. And whether South Africa's 'haves' and even its 'have nots' realise it or not, the metrics determining the atmospheric pressure of the Atmosphere of Trade are not made in America or Europe, but in Asia or, even further north of us, in East and West Africa. South Africa is a heavily 'financialised' economy, a telltale sign that might indicate we breathe the Atmosphere of Capital rather than that of Trade. The JSE's market capitalisation as a percentage of GDP — at 321% in 2022 — is the second highest in the world. Only Hong Kong — with its raft of Chinese listings trading on the HKSE's H-share platform — had a larger ratio: 1,110%. South Africa — the world's 39th largest economy — also has in value terms in the rand, the 20th most traded currency as well as having the 21st most traded bond market. These otherwise impressive financial statistics obscure the less flattering economic metrics that lie beneath: our depressingly low GDP growth, chronically high unemployment and rising national debt. Our glossy financial ratios also offer cover to the dire status of the economic debate in South Africa: the hard truth is that it has become sterile and is running out of ideas. Judging by our recent economic performance, to paraphrase an advertising slogan from Margaret Thatcher's 1979 election campaign, 'South Africa isn't working'. Why? Because in the precise words of that slogan, our ' Labour isn't working'. Yet few economic commentators in either our public or private sectors want to risk rocking our financial boat even if, deep down, the conventional — and now ossified — economic wisdom as to how we might better run our economy is in fact a critical part of our problem. In the end, I maintain it comes down to a stark choice: Should South Africa's economy be run so that it benefits those few of us living in the Atmosphere of Capital? Or should it be run for the benefit of those many that might have a better chance of succeeding breathing the Atmosphere of Trade? The unsavoury truth is that as things stand, our economic frog is slowly but surely boiling and doing so in sterile policy water. Yet to us 'haves', were we to remove those rose-tinted glasses we traditionally use to gaze fondly upon our Western idols, we would realise that the economic debate in the West has become stultifyingly sterile too. Boa constrictor logic There, the boa constrictor logic of deteriorating demographics plus stagnant GDP growth plus rising national debt is slowly but surely squeezing the life out of many Western economies. Taking on more national debt — which even the erstwhile prudent Germans have now opted to do — is surely but another step along the West's highway to hell. And Western bond markets — including those of Japan — are starting to hint to investors of what torment lies ahead. So too is the rising price of gold. My fear is that those who count in the formulation of South Africa's economic policy might read my words and either reject them out of hand… or simply ignore them. But then that is what happened in the US when Cassandras ranging from Bob Dylan to Vaclav Smil warned what would happen if the US were to deindustrialise. Yet so few US politicians or economists paid heed! (Cassandra was a Trojan Princess cursed by Apollo to be able to predict the future accurately, but have no one believe her.) It is essential that South Africa's policy makers listen to other views on how we might chart a more prosperous way forward. Most historians agree that it was Einstein who said: 'The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.' DM
