Five things you need to know about SA today

1. It’s the state of nation address today in Parliament. Always interesting to see how fast and well the online media can cover such an event. Meanwhile, The Times reports that both Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki will be there. Click here to read.

2. Business Day has an interesting analysis of Reserve Bank Governor Tito Mboweni’s unusual attempt to talk down the rand yesterday. Click here to read. He’s clearly worried about our exports, with mining and manufacturing showing record declines recently.

3. Moneyweb has an interesting international story about Australia bucking the world trend and avoiding recession thus far. The magic ingredient seems to be aggressive action from Oz’s central bank, which cut its repo rate by 425 basis points in  seven months, taking it to a record low of 3%. The government also came up with  A$52-billion stimulus package. Read the story here.

4. Business Report explains why food prices in SA supermarkets are still high while agricultural prices have dropped. Commodities are hard to understand but it seems the rand has some role to pay and it takes a while for lower agricultural prices to feed into the economy. You can take some solace from the fact that we’re not the only ones in the world with high food prices.  In Canada, for instance, food inflation is 17 times higher than overall inflation – at 7.1%  compared with 0.4 %. In SA, food inflation is 13.7%  compared with  8.4% overall. Click here to read the story at IOL.

5. Which brings us back to President Jacob Zuma’s address today. The M&G says our economic woes are sure to take centre stage in the speech. Click here to read a rundown of the concerns analysts would like to see addressed.

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