On the way back to the presidential palace Jakarta spoke with the Finance Minister and the head of SA’s central bank by phone. He asked the latter about the rate of growth in SA’s money supply and about the robustness of the country’s main commercial banks. Jakarta ordered that no further ‘open market operations’ could occur without his consent.
“How will we set interest rates?”
“We won’t,” said Jakarta.
The central banker expressed the concern that such a measure could cause a liquidity crisis. Jakarta said that other measures would, insha’Allah, prevent or at least contain such a crisis. Jakarta also instructed the central banker to switch all of SA’s reserves out of sovereign bonds of other countries and switch three-fifths into gold bullion (held within the territory of SA) and put the remainder into shares of unhedged gold mining companies. The central banker said he would get this done within twenty-four hours. He said that he would do this as discreetly as possible but it would be almost impossible to prevent this development from becoming public knowledge.
“However hard we might try we cannot foresee every development,” said Jakarta. “We’ve got to do what’s right.”
After the call Jakarta asked Falkland about preparations for his blog. Falkland said that he had found a suitable company that would ensure adequate bandwidth and site reliability in exchange for 3% of all advertising revenue derived from the site. Jakarta said he wanted the blog to charge two euros per comment posted (with an additional auction process that would give people the opportunity to place their comment higher up the display of comments). Hopefully, this would reduce the amount of abusive and spurious comments posted to the site.
“How will we set interest rates?”
“We won’t,” said Jakarta.
The central banker expressed the concern that such a measure could cause a liquidity crisis. Jakarta said that other measures would, insha’Allah, prevent or at least contain such a crisis. Jakarta also instructed the central banker to switch all of SA’s reserves out of sovereign bonds of other countries and switch three-fifths into gold bullion (held within the territory of SA) and put the remainder into shares of unhedged gold mining companies. The central banker said he would get this done within twenty-four hours. He said that he would do this as discreetly as possible but it would be almost impossible to prevent this development from becoming public knowledge.
“However hard we might try we cannot foresee every development,” said Jakarta. “We’ve got to do what’s right.”
After the call Jakarta asked Falkland about preparations for his blog. Falkland said that he had found a suitable company that would ensure adequate bandwidth and site reliability in exchange for 3% of all advertising revenue derived from the site. Jakarta said he wanted the blog to charge two euros per comment posted (with an additional auction process that would give people the opportunity to place their comment higher up the display of comments). Hopefully, this would reduce the amount of abusive and spurious comments posted to the site.
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