Elon Musk’s SpaceX makes history, and countries fight for a slice of historic South African company
South Africa’s rand weakened to a more than seven-month low this week, driven by a surging US dollar and the domestic post-election fallout.
These factors saw the rand slump toward R17 against the US dollar, as investors are also preparing for the Reserve Bank’s interest rate decision this coming week.
The Reserve Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) will meet on Thursday, 19 November, to determine South Africa’s interest rates for the month ahead.
Economists are split on whether the meeting will lead to a hike or a hold, and will be keeping a close eye on South Africa’s October CPI data.
This data will be released by Statistics South Africa on Wednesday, 18 November, a day before the MPC announces its decision.
Similar to the rand, South African markets closed the week lower, with the All Share Index dipping 0.45% by Friday.
Some of the biggest drags on the exchange this week were in the financials and luxury goods sectors, including Standard Bank, Nedbank, and Richemont.
In the coming week, investors can look forward to results from Investec, Ninety One, Telkom, and PPC.
In contrast to the JSE, major US stock indices finished the week higher overall, despite some drops recorded later in the week.
Investors spent the week grappling with the leadership turmoil at AI leader Nvidia, which culminated in CEO Jensen Huang’s resignation on 12 November.
Wall Street is also gearing up for Anthropic’s initial public offering, with the AI giant and Claude-owner scheduled to price its IPO on Wednesday, 18 November.
Asian markets experienced a more mixed week, with Japan’s Nikkei and Korea’s KOSPI seeing weekly gains while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng slipped.
This marked a rebound for Japan and Korea, as they recovered from prior sell-offs and bargain hunting in domestic semiconductor and AI hardware stocks.
Important finance and investing news
Floating data centres in development: Some AI companies are in the early stages of developing offshore data centres that can be placed in bodies of water. This comes as data centres on land continue to face opposition and debates on where they can be built. [Wall Street Journal]
SpaceX makes history: Elon Musk’s SpaceX made history when its Starship spacecraft returned from orbit to the same spot where it lifted off. This denoted a key milestone in SpaceX’s vision of building reusable rockets. [New York Times]
Latin America’s crypto killer is the US dollar: Stablecoins with direct access to the US dollar have become a primary use case across Latin America, used as everyday payment tools and inflation hedges rather than as speculative assets. [Bloomberg]
The countries fighting for a slice of historic South African company: Angola, Botswana, and Namibia’s governments are looking to buy a stake in De Beers. Botswana is set to become the company’s biggest shareholder after Anglo American’s sale of its majority stake. [CNBC Africa]
Microsoft services restored: Microsoft confirmed on Saturday that Teams, Outlook, and its other products’ services have been restored. This outage crippled online business communications for businesses and governments across the world for more than 24 hours. [Reuters]
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