Staying liquid

We live in a world without values. The guiding principle of relativity requires that only that which is expedient has value. All else is expendable.

One of the more intriguing trends I have read about over the past period of time concerns the drift away from ownership of anything illiquid on the part of the Mega Corporation. According to reports surfacing on a more regular basis now, large corporations are increasingly divesting themselves of 'hard assets' and staying liquid. Staying liquid with a range of currencies is a full time exercise one imagines, given the sideways volatility of the contemporary investment world.

So it's away with property. Owning property is becoming inconvenient, the cost benefit ratios have apparently begun to pall and so don't own property. That includes land. The people who are buying land may well be increasingly those who intend to use it themselves somehow as opposed to investors looking for options.

The election result was a reality check, which few of us are yet prepared to acknowledge. A government with huge levels of discontent, serious accusations of rising corruption barely checked with a recent barrage of promises is elected unanimously by even those who are most enraged. Wow.

By any standards this is abnormal. And people who move other people's money around appear to have become nervous. The rand is off a tad, and damm, the gold price has sagged as well, but then gold has a limited future doesn't it?

That suggests some selling at the margins, which shifted. Nothing seismic, although the leapfrog trick being pulled this week by The Rozwi clique in upper Rumbabwe, grabbing fifty one percent of the country's mines without paying a cent-Gimme they say- will once again have raised the issue of owning assets that cannot be moved around electronically.

Now obviously one of the basic things you learn in business school these days is that a trend once established is unstoppable until something dramatic happens or it burns itself out. Those are 101 axioms. The most likely probability at the moment is that the hedge fund players offshore who jol with our currency: popping in and out;are putting their money here because they need to cover various short, medium and long positions. Now there are a number of factors starting to pile up and they may not look bad to us because we're inside the web, but to some out there they will move their options to somewhere less dramatic. A place where people are burning tyres in the streets in protest one minute and then going off to vote unanimously for the same government is a cause for confusion. It's unnatural and to people unfamiliar with our curious politics it carries overtones that are suspect.

The finer nuances are not these people's territory anything that pushes the risk is avoidable.

Fortunately however we live in a value free world where the promise of reasonable returns will always entice someone to invest and so the trend having been established must flow on. It is, as the easterners call it: destiny. We shall simply keep changing our investors. Someone somewhere will buy the 49 % that the Rozwi in Rumbabwe will leave to the present owners. Most owners will sell their 49% to some or other nefarious offshore consortium, which would be sensible. When one rights violator does deals with other violators who bleeds? Plus owning 51 % of nothing has a seriously affirming ring to it.

Aagh but they have platinum they say [and so do we] they say and everyone needs platinum don't they that's why the price keeps going up. Rumour has it that this platinum could be replaced with synthetics should the market become hostile. This threat was levelled some years ago when the major players in the platinum business were holding back stock from the market to force the price up.

The world of Quantum physics is advancing by the minute and it is long since now that people have been doing amazing stuff with moving particles smaller than atoms. The manufacture of everything we currently believe to be an essential commodity is limited only by the price. There will be a price of these metals like platinum and oil and gold that will breed forth substitutes and eliminate the market altogether.

A world without values is truly that. All things are possible and all things are expendable.