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A very welcome set of stories cover the cost of petrol today.
The Business Times reported that the department of Minerals and Energy would be able to further cut the cost of petrol in December.
This was based on the daily over-recovery rate remaining at the levels seen on Wednesday the 5th of November. The next petrol price announcement is scheduled to take place on the 28th of November. iAfrica also followed this story from I-Net Bridge. You can compare car insurance quotes here. The Times covered news of the world oil price slipping to just under $ 60 US for light sweet crude, but later recovering. These price plunges from $ 147 US a Barrel in only July to now are caused in part by slowing global demand.
The slowdown is extending its roots everywhere and if you are not prepared you should do some budgeting. Business Day carried a piece on how globally banks are cutting there interest rates, sometimes by massive increments to usual, in a bid to revitalise their economies.
South African banks are safer and you can compare banks with Justmoney, but the bite is in and we all need to keep careful track of our money. The BBC reported that British banks are under pressure to cut their bond rates as the Bank of England, their equivalent of our Reserve bank shock cut interest rates yesterday. Alaister Darling, the British chancellor, waggled his eyebrows at the commercial banks to pass the rate cut on.
Business Day reported that the local property market was looking bleak, with ABSA's latest housing figures showing that nominal house prices only gained 1.2% last month which is the slowest rate of growth since the dawn of January 1993. The sub-prime collapse was in part caused by debt being lent on the expectation of rising property prices which eventually stopped rising and called in the whole caboodle. If you are struggling with your debts you can get online debt consolidation with Justmoney. The Dispatch ran a quirky story about how Japanese estate agents can tell the age of a building by the height of its ceilings. Apparently in the recession years, cost cutting lead to lower ceilings and more floors in newly built apartment blocks. Will we start to see cheaper smaller buildings going up here? Regardless, if you want a home loan or a re-mortgage you can get them both online with Justmoney.
In a final article the Wall Street Journal interviews the father of portfolio theory, Harry Markowitz. He invented the diversified portfolio to spread risk, but is critical of the derivative instruments that engineered the current collapse. "Diversifying sufficiently among uncorrelated risks can reduce portfolio risk toward zero," he says in the interview. "But financial engineers should know that's not true of a portfolio of correlated risks."