Boehner, bain of the recovery

For some time now prospects for global equities have steadily ticked up. The first signal was the significant fall in volatility in the Euro as Eurozone leaders coordinated various moves to allay investors' fears that the whole edifice would crack and collapse. Another key was the dawning perception that US housing's long slump was over. Now it is common to read about how the number of new homes built is outstripped by household formations. In reality this is a big pendulum swing that's been under way for some years. If we look at the four major economic zones, US, Eurozone, China and Japan it is possible to paint quite a positive synchronised recovery picture for 2013 - not stellar but moving in the right direction, and still accompanied by very low global interest rates. In such a world, where do you wanna be? In equities, has been my call and still is. Enter stage right, the dysfunctional US political system led by the Republicans under John Boehner. Fiscal cliff is all you've been reading about for weeks and they are still bickering more than ever. If I was American I'd vote Republican, but this is ridiculous. America needs to avert the cliff now and restructure it's entire tax system shortly thereafter. It's simple arithmetic, stupid. The clock is ticking on the national debt, fast. But they continue to play silly brinkmanship. Obama won the election, move on. The QSL is from WCKY, Cincinnati, Boehner's home town, heard on AM 1530 in Cape Town way back in 1968.

Makes you want to run the red light

Traffic lights drive you mad. Or robots, as they are quaintly called in South Africa. Sometimes the whole intersection is idling, waiting for pedestrian lights even though there aren't any pedestrians. Or the lights are green for the cross road but no cars are there, meanwhile there's a bunch of cars waiting on your side. Tests are now being conducted in Harris County, Texas to combine smart lights with vehicles' new anti-idling systems to calculate the flows at intersections. This system also makes use of drivers' cellphones, like Waze does for traffic densities. Already in place is the Scoot technology used on many of the 4000 traffic signals in London and 250 of the 1200 lights in Cape Town. Cape Town Council claims its Scoot system saves motorists R30 million in 'operating and time costs'. That may be so but I can think of loads of intersections where there seems to be a lot of pointless idling and waiting, burning up gas and time. And it's often for those invisible pedestrians. I can remember in Cape Town years ago a system of rubber strips on the road that recorded flow and sent this to the light, which would then react. Many lights had them and they seemed to work pretty well. They've gone now. A case where new technology has retrogressed from old technology. The QSL is from KYOK, Houston in Harris County Texas. They were using just 5 kW on AM 1590, heard in Morgan Bay, South Africa in 1993.

Dak down in the Drak

Cape Town's excellent V&A Waterfront was the scene for Red Bull's Flugtag today and 40+ aircraft of all shapes and sizes strutted their stuff. These events never fail to impress with their ingenuity and pure sense of fun. Some of the planes were destined from the start to plunge straight into the water, from the 6-metre high ramp protruding off Jetty 1. And so it was with concoctions that paid barely no attention to basic aerodynamics but were still propelled into the abyss with great abandon. My son Matt's plane was a serious effort by the Cape Town Flying Club with an 8-metre wingspan and a rear flap that enabled them to get some lift. For pilots, this week has been tragic with the SA Air Force 35 Squadron (based near Cape Town) C-47 going down over the Drakensberg with 11 on board. This was a modified Dakota, basically a DC-3 with turbo engines. The Dak is an amazing survivor, the first being built in 1935 and widely used ever since for many purposes. They were built in plants in California as well as Oklahoma City, 10 000 in all over the years. I had quite a few flights in Daks during the 1970s, mainly in what was then South-West Africa, flown by young pilots who used to throw the planes around like toys. They were built to take punishment, which makes the 35 Squadron loss all the more mysterious. It will be hard to determine just what went wrong because there was no black box on board. The QSL is from KOMA Radio in Oklahoma City, heard on a trip to San Francisco in 1993. One of the great US AM stations.

Sierra Leone swings through the cycle

Sierra Leone is a poor country, with GDP of just $2.2bn and a population of around 6 million. By comparison, London has a population slightly larger at 8 million and a GDP of over $750bn. But Sierra Leone is on a roll with real growth running at around 6% in recent years and a huge surge likely this year with the flow of iron ore production hitting full stride. The country was devastated by a terrible civil war which ended in 2001, infamous for 'blood diamond' atrocities. This was the third election since then and the first to be run by the country itself. Incumbent president, Ernest Bai Koroma  was elected to a second term with a convincing majority of 59%, enough to avoid a second round vote, while the ruling party, All People's Congress, increased its majority in parliament. The opposition has alleged irregularities and stuffed ballot boxes but is unlikely to resort to violence and the international observer community has given the thumbs up. So yet another west African state passes more or less smoothly through an election cycle and the region's growth continues to hum along. The QSL is from Radio Sierra Leone, heard on 90mb short-wave in Cape Town in 1969. It has the distinctive Africa-shaped Sierra Leone human rights stamp on the postcard. What a nice surprise in the mailbox, long ago