The SWC is over and South Africans are now no longer temporarily insulated by the global woes. We remain in a precarious financial recession, underpinned by the continuing deteriorating fundamentals in the US and Europe, and coupled by our own declining employment levels.
What can we do to get ourselves out of this mess? Well we all need to be in grindstone mode, eliminating all our operational and people inefficiences, setting up planning teams, researching our industry, it's markets, the players, the opportunities, challenges and risks. Once we have this information to hand we will be in a far better position to make some informed decisions about how and where we need to focus our energies on. This is no "Shangri-La".
We must be ready to act when the markets start moving in a positive direction, and they will, once certain of the basic fundamentals start to improve. In SA this will in all likelyhood begin when Government starts awarding tenders on the proposed R800bn budget spend allocation. Timing of this requires some urgency now, but of course not too far away from election 2014 as people will forget how "wonderful" they are. Take your pick.
Internationally; G7 governments will in all likelyhood need to kickstart this process, once they can begin to agree on whether or not the global stimulus packages need extension or not. The problem is all the quid-quo-pro deals that need to be aligned!!! amazing hey, to heck with the rest of the world, whilst it drowns.
