Just out of interest's sake,
One of the reasons why South Africa is weathering this economic storm
quite well (there appears to be
no crisis whatsoever in our financial services sector) is because we
have very strict credit laws -
I have never seen a "no limit" credit card here, and last year with
revised laws it just became
10x more difficult to loan money.
Anybody in the loans business has to comply with strict regulations in
ensuring the borrower could
actually pay back the debt with some reasonable certainty, and in any
advertising they have to give
a full break-down of what the *real* costs would be to the consumer,
so they can't hide stuff like
huge balloon payments at the end of a car lease with seemingly low
monthly payments, they actually
have to lay it all bare in the advertising.
Strangely, South Africa does have a huge problem with house-hold debt,
and I think that is largely due to
the fact that many people, after our country became democratic, had
access to good jobs and money
loans. This is not at all racist statement, but the previously
disadvantaged people in our country (i.e.
the black people) obviously had to "over-compensate" for their past by
going a bit overboard with
the status symbols (I understand Russia is going through a very
similar thing after the fall of communism)
and that, together with our country's aggressive implementation of
affirmative action (putting black people
in prime job positions based on race instead of merit) has created
quite a problem with house-hold debt,
and furthermore it has created a bigger gap than there ever was
(between the rich and the poor).
So we have a different kind of crisis to solve here, and there are
major problems with society (such as
the terrible crime, of which you know I was a victim a few weeks back)
- but our economic sector
itself (banks, etc) are in great shape.
Yet, our currency has tumbled against the US dollar because all the
investors are pulling money out
of emerging markets, and pooling it back in the U.S. Very unfair,
since our economic sector is so much
healthier than the US or EU's!
Anyway, just a bit of info on what's happening over here. This
economic crisis is very interesting.
Ours is couple with a political crisis, which will all contribute to
making the mid-term future
very interesting/challenging over here. We have to keep our
international options open!
Luckily (for any of you software guys out there) MagicDraw UML has
decided to adopt/support the
business design process (called URDAD) my colleague and I had
invented, so this will be great
for a foot in the door of the international software market.
In the meantime, I am enjoying my OM-1n :-) The 'new' darkroom will be
in a state to develop film in the next
couple of days, then I shall post results.
enjoy life,
Dawid
On 03 Nov 2008, at 3:24 PM, John Hermanson wrote:
>
> Anyone here using American Express recently discover their credit
> limit
> has been cut way way back and AE won't explain why? AE used to the
> "no
> limits" cc.
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