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The rand swung wildly in the early hours of yesterday, jumping from R13,68 to R13,72 to the dollar at 3am, in what is likely to be a jittery day for currencies. “Major currencies were on tenterhooks on Thursday on the eve of Washington’s deadline to impose tariffs on Chinese imports while the yuan held steady after the central bank this week sought to stem its recent tumble,” Reuters said in its foreign exchange report.

The rand was trading at R13,71 to the dollar, R15,98 to the euro and R18,13 to the pound at 6.40am.
Asian markets were gloomy ahead of the JSE’s opening, with Tokyo’s Topix down 1.15 percent, the Shanghai composite index down 0,88 percent and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index down 0.87 percent.

Naspers’s 31 percent-owned Tencent was down 0,16 percent at HK$382,40.
In Sydney, BHP was down 0,64 percent at A$3284 and South32 was down 0,28 percent at A$3,56.
No JSE-listed companies are diarised to release results on Thursday.

On the economics front, Statistics SA will report May’s electricity consumption figures at 1pm.
The amount of electricity that countries produce and consume is a reliable barometer of the health of modern economies.

Stats SA’s electricity figures show that this country’s electricity consumption peaked at 20,403 gigawatt-hours in August 2007 before tumbling to 18 232 gigawatt-hours at the height of Eskom’s rolling blackouts in December 2009.

In April, Stats SA reported total electricity generation at 19,014 gigawatt-hours, indicating the economy has still not recovered to where it was before the 2008 global economic crisis.

Electricity consumption tends to grow in winter, so May’s consumption should be higher than April’s. — BusinessDay.