Steady finances, growing risks ahead of SA's MTBPS & Experts predict end of reliance on Hormuz

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And now, The Money Show with Stephen Grootes on 702 Let's walk the talk.

Stephen Grootes (0:07)

The Money Show with Stephen Grootes is brought to you by Absa, making it easier to do business across Africa. Absa is an authorised financial services and a registered credit provider. Nine minutes after 6, good evening, welcome to the programme. I'm Stephen Grootes. If you were the person standing up tomorrow as the finance minister, delivering, what's the technical term? Medium-term budget policy statement. What would be the one thing you would announce? I'm fairly certain that many, many people are going to say, well, actually, what we would do first is provide some fuel relief. Would you do that? Would you be one of those people who goes in that direction?

Fiscal anchor, anyone? Anyone sort of a limit on how much government can borrow? Anyone sort of the suggestion of where else we could cut spending perhaps to pay for it? That might be a good suggestion as well. Not too late to influence national policy, please, 727021702 We'll focus on that in a moment. Isaac Matshego is a senior economist at Nedbank. Ask him what he's expecting tomorrow. Also questions as well, of course, about whether this is the right time for a fiscal anchor. Financially it might be, politically might be a slightly different story. I was amazed at the suggestion from the CEO at HSBC, Georges L. Heldry, late yesterday actually, that the Strait of Hormuz could be declared redundant within the next five years. We'll speak to Timothy Walker, an expert on international affairs and shipping on that in about five minutes. Incredible stories emerging around people whose identities are stolen. The claim is that they are deceased when they're actually still very much alive. Basically, it's about stealing their property. We'll speak to Johan Stehnen, an investigator at the Insurance Crime Bureau.

Then we thought worth getting a little bit more about the situation regarding safety and CEOs' bonuses in some of the big mining companies. One of the big questions for me is always the fact that mines now need to report their number of fatalities over a financial year at the start of their financial results. How that's really made a little bit of a difference or hasn't it? So we'll talk about that on The Money Show as well. We'll speak to David from Vake the Mining Analyst about that. Good to hear from you tonight.

011-AA-307-02-021-4460567 and of course your thoughts please on tomorrow's money budget 072-702-1702.

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The Money Show with Stephen Grootes live on 92.7 and 106 FM.

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Stephen Grootes (2:43)

Well this time tomorrow we should know the answer to several pretty burning questions, including whether government could give us any relief from fuel prices and fuel taxes, how the tax take has improved, whether there will be a fiscal anchor. The Finance Minister, Enoch Godongwana, he will give his medium term budget policy statement in parliament 2 o'clock tomorrow afternoon. Isaac Matshego is the Senior Economist at Nedbank. Isaac, good evening.

Our fiscal situation does appear to have improved. We're getting higher gold and platinum prices. I presume that's increased the tax take. How's government's financial situation changed since we saw the Finance Minister deliver his budget?

Isaac Matshego (3:22)

Thank you, Stephen.

Well, the tax take has been satisfactory. We've seen growth of 7.9% in the first five months of the fiscal year. That is from April to August. But that is driven primarily by higher corporate taxes, which jumped by 21% over that period. We are a bit worried about the trend in personal income tax, which is likely to come under pressure in the second half of the year. And also, for levies, I mean, for reasons we know, they down by almost 46%.

And that is primarily due to the for levy cuts. So I would not be too excited if I was the finance minister about these numbers, because the second half of the year is still ahead of us. And we're seeing slowdowns in some key sectors, particularly mining and manufacturing. And of course, government also is a consumer in this economy. It's facing the higher inflation pressure.

Stephen Grootes (4:27)

So I mean, one, I'm sure, one of the solutions that could be proposed for that is some kind of relief for fuel prices. Some money, it seems, got set aside for that.

Do you think there's a chance that that will happen? I mean, fuel prices are really biting at the moment, but the minister is under fiscal pressure.

Isaac Matshego (4:48)

Most likely, we will get that, you know, between April and August. We saw that, but unfortunately, or let me say encouragingly, national revenue sacrificed about 18 billion in FWRE levels. This is if we compare to what the numbers were over the first five months of the previous fiscal year.