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2026 Budget: A little relief, a lot of responsibility

The most important number in this year’s Budget is R21.3 billion, representing the upward revision of gross tax revenue compared to 2025’s estimate. It is also the number that bought Treasury room to withdraw the previously pencilled-in R20 billion tax increase, restore inflation relief, and present a Budget that feels less punitive than many feared. That is not the same as saying that South Africa (SA) suddenly has fiscal abundance. It means that Treasury got a temporary revenue cushion and chose to use it to steady the mood.

For households, the Budget matters immediately. After two years without full inflationary relief, bracket creep is no longer doing all the work for the South African Revenue Service. The tax-free annual investment limit rises from R36 000 to R46 000, and the retirement fund deduction cap increases from R350 000 to R430 000. These are sensible signals: Save more, build resilience, and rely less on the state. But investors should not confuse tax relief with higher real prosperity. Relief from fiscal drag helps cash flow; it does not create income growth.

And the Budget quietly claws some of that relief back. The General Fuel Levy rises by 9 cents a litre for petrol and 8 cents for diesel. On top of that, the Carbon Fuel Levy and Road Accident Fund Levy also rise. Tobacco and alcohol excise duties go up, too. In practice, this means that many households will ‘feel’ the Budget less through their tax tables and more through transport costs, distribution costs, and the slow spread of higher living expenses. That is the real story for households: Not a fiscal gift, but a slightly softer squeeze.

For small businesses, the most practical move may be the increase in the compulsory value-added tax registration threshold from R1 million to R2.3 million. This is meaningful: It reduces compliance pressure on smaller firms, preserves working capital, and removes a layer of admin. It may not create a boom, but it could improve survival at the margin: And, in SA, margins are where many businesses live or die.

At a national level, the Budget is clearly about stabilisation, not escape velocity. Treasury projects real gross domestic product (GDP) growth of 1.6% in 2026, with growth averaging 1.8% over the medium term. The consolidated Budget deficit narrows to 4.5% of GDP in 2025/2026, while gross debt stabilises at 78.9% of GDP before easing. Treasury also plans to table a principles-based fiscal anchor in the Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement. These are all good signs. But they do not change the deeper reality: SA is still trying to become fiscally safer faster than it is becoming economically stronger.

The real limit remains growth. Debt-service costs still rise in nominal terms to R420.6 billion in 2026, and they absorb 21.3% of main Budget revenue in 2025/2026 before gradually declining. That is the hidden tax in this Budget: The cost of old mistakes. Every rand spent servicing debt is a rand not spent fixing municipalities, expanding productive infrastructure, or strengthening the state’s capacity where it actually matters. Fiscal credibility has improved, yes, but fiscal freedom has not.

Government is also still heavily redistributive: The social wage remains more than 60% of non-interest spending. That protects the floor under society, and rightly so. But it also tells investors something uncomfortable: This Budget is better at preventing deterioration than generating lift.

Economist Dawie Roodt captured the mood well when he said that SA is “probably not going to get poorer, but certainly will not be getting richer”. And that is the real verdict on the 2026 Budget: It lowers the risk of a fiscal accident. It gives households and businesses a bit more breathing room. Subtly, it also reinforces a core financial well-being truth: Resilience will still have to be built largely at the household and business levels, not outsourced to Treasury. For investors, this is a Budget to respect, not celebrate. It improves the base case. It does not yet change the long-term one.

The credibility premium: When markets start pricing the referees

Most market weeks feel like a tug of war between growth and inflation. Yet, 2026 is increasingly about a third variable that does not sit neatly in a spreadsheet, namely institutional credibility. This is not about policy itself, but rather about whether institutions that set policy can still commit to it when political incentives change.

In the United States (US), this question has been highlighted through a confrontation that began with tariffs and ended at the Federal Reserve’s (Fed’s) doorstep. A Fed-linked study has argued that the bulk of tariff costs has been borne at home rather than by foreign exporters. The White House’s response on this has been unusually direct: Senior officials have attacked the work and called for the authors to be “disciplined”. Fed policymakers have pushed back, warning that pressure on research is, in practice, pressure on independence. When the referee becomes part of the campaign, markets pay attention.

This matters far beyond Washington because independence is not a moral ornament. It is a pricing input. When investors believe a central bank is insulated, long-dated yields can be lower because the future path of rates is more credible. When investors suspect policy is being leaned on for electoral timing, a credibility premium appears. It shows up as a higher term premium, jumpier auctions, and a market that demands more compensation for tail risks that used to be dismissed as political theatre.

Here is the nuance that South African investors should not miss: The dollar’s reaction is not automatic. If credibility fears flip into global risk-off dynamics, the dollar often strengthens because the world reaches for dollar cash and safe collateral. Emerging markets then take the punch through weaker currencies and wider spreads. But, if the shock is perceived as US institutional damage (confidence in US policymaking itself), the dollar can weaken even as US yields reprice higher. Either way, global financial conditions tighten; the channel just changes.

Tariffs are an accelerant because they impose costs unevenly. Large multinationals can reroute supply chains, renegotiate contracts, and hedge. Mid-sized firms usually cannot. Evidence from US banking research suggests that tariff payments by mid-market businesses have surged sharply even as the headline trade deficit has barely shifted. That combination is politically combustible: Visible costs, an unclear payoff, and pressure to keep borrowing costs low to protect sentiment. A resilient gross domestic product print can, therefore, co-exist with growing micro-level strain, which is exactly the kind of environment where institutional guardrails get tested.

Europe offers a revealing contrast: A decade ago, the eurozone’s so-called periphery (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain) was shorthand for fiscal stress. Yet, in recent years, these economies have narrowed bond spreads, improved budget discipline, and outgrown parts of the traditional “core”. Their recovery has not been magic. It has been the slow compounding return of credibility: Reforms that stuck, budgets that became less improvisational, and institutions that regained the benefit of the doubt in capital markets.

Europe’s current competitiveness debate adds a second lesson: Businesses can live with regulation; what they struggle to price is regulatory whiplash. Leaders call for deregulation while simultaneously telling businesses to invest for the long term. Those promises collide when rules are announced, capital is committed, and then policies are diluted to placate whoever shouts the loudest. Predictability is a form of capital. Remove it, and you raise the cost of doing business without ever announcing a tax.

For South Africans, this is not distant theatre. We live with a currency that reprices quickly when global term premia rise, and a bond curve that reflects not only inflation expectations but trust in medium-term fiscal arithmetic and institutional restraint. The investing question for 2026 is, therefore, less about what the Fed will do next and more about what will happen if markets start doubting who the Fed is allowed to be. Markets can digest bad news. They struggle with politicised referees. Trust, once discounted, is expensive to buy back, and emerging markets usually pay the surcharge first.

 

The 18-month myth: AI cannot automate jobs until companies do

The countdown narrative is back. In a recent interview, Mustafa Suleyman argued that most computer-based professional tasks could be automated within 12 to 18 months. This is a bold claim and easy to believe if you only watch model demonstrations. Here is the controversial counter: The timeline is wrong, not because the models are weak, but because organisations are slow. Everyone is confusing capability with adoption. Models can improve at an exponential-looking rate, whereas institutions almost never do. Companies move through procurement, governance, integration, training, and change management, only to discover that the edge cases were never documented. The bottleneck is not intelligence. It is implementation.

Most white-collar work is also not ‘sitting at a computer’. It is the invisible glue between systems: Exceptions, approvals, hand-offs, judgement calls, liability, and audit trails. This glue is what makes work expensive, and what makes automation hard. You cannot replace an accounts payable clerk with an agent if invoices arrive in five formats, vendor masters are inconsistent, approvals happen via e-mail, and the record of truth lives in someone’s head. Artificial intelligence (AI) can draft, classify and suggest, but true automation requires machine-readable work: Clean data, defined controls, and a reliable path from input to decision to audit. That is why the phrase “retrofit AI into any organisation” should make executives smile. Most companies cannot quickly retrofit far simpler technology. Anyone who has lived through a simple workflow redesign knows the pattern: Data cleansing, policy fights, scope creep, and months lost to the messy 10% that drives 90% of the risk.

In regulated industries, the friction is multiplied. If a workflow touches client money, privacy, or fiduciary duty, “good enough” is not good enough. You need governance: What the model can access, how it is monitored, how errors are escalated, and who is accountable when it fails. Automation is not a software purchase; it is a new operating model with new liability. Productivity is even messier than the hype suggests: A rigorous field experiment by METR found that experienced software developers sometimes took longer with AI tools because they spent time verifying, correcting, and integrating outputs. That does not disprove AI; it proves that efficiency depends on workflow fit, not just raw capability.

 

So, what happens first, if not mass unemployment in 18 months?

Task compression: The hours spent on drafting, searching, summarising, first-pass analysis, routine reporting, and basic client communication shrink. Teams do not disappear overnight; they re-shape. The biggest hit is often at the entry level: Fewer junior analysts and fewer apprenticeship roles that used to be justified by grunt work. The labour market adjusts quietly long before it adjusts loudly through mass layoffs.

And here is the investor implication that people keep missing: If adoption is the bottleneck, the winners are not only the frontier model builders. The winners are the businesses selling the plumbing that turns old institutions into AI-ready institutions: Data engineering, integration layers, identity and access management, cybersecurity, model monitoring, audit trails, and process redesign. In other words, the boring enterprise stack that makes automation safe, accountable, and scalable.

Expect the AI boom to show up first as spending on integration and governance, not sudden headcount collapses. This matters in South Africa more than most, as many firms are still digitising basics and modernising legacy cores. In this environment, AI does not replace the back office overnight; it sits on top of it, constrained by it. The sequence is to digitise, standardise, implement, and then automate. Skip the first steps, and you do not get a jobless boom; you get a compliance incident.

The point is simple: AI may be racing ahead. Organisations are not. The next 18 months will be noisy, experimental, and occasionally brutal at the margins. But the “white-collar extinction event” is not a date on a calendar. It is an organisational decade disguised as a technological year.

 

The comfort trap: When “truthiness” becomes policy

Markets love a simple promise: When things get tough, someone will step in. In the United States (US) that promise has a name: The “Fed put”. This refers to the belief that the central bank will cushion losses and keep the cycle alive. This belief is again being tested as President Donald Trump nominates Kevin Warsh to lead the Federal Reserve (Fed).

Warsh’s critique has a certain “truthiness”: “Money on Wall Street is too easy, and credit on Main Street is too tight”. He has also argued for shrinking the Fed’s balance sheet, a move that can push up longer-term borrowing costs even if the policy rate falls. But the same storyline often smuggles in a second promise: That an artificial intelligence-driven productivity boom is close enough to let rates drop without inflation returning. Investors should be careful. Productivity miracles are not policy tools; they are outcomes. Betting today’s valuations on tomorrow’s productivity is how “truthiness” becomes strategy.

The deeper issue is not who chairs the Fed. It is that modern economies have become addicted to stabilisers. Over the past few decades, recessions have become rarer and expansions longer. This is partly because policymakers learned to fight every fire with rate cuts, emergency liquidity, fiscal cheques, and regulatory flexibility. Over time, this rewires incentives. When downturns are postponed repeatedly, risk does not disappear; it migrates. It shows up as higher leverage, thinner equity buffers, and companies that survive on refinancing rather than profits. Markets get trained to buy every dip because the referee hates drawdowns. The paradox is that the more stability you manufacture, the bigger the eventual repricing can be, because everyone is positioned for rescue.

Now widen the lens. The world is shifting from globalisation as the default to industrial policy as the default. The European Union (EU) is preparing “made in Europe” rules that would tilt parts of public procurement towards local production in green technologies. India, long a protectionist, is moving towards major trade deals with the US and the EU to accelerate export-led manufacturing. And the race for critical minerals is turning Brazil into a geopolitical auction house, with Washington backing a $565 million financing deal for Serra Verde, a Brazilian rare earths miner.

These trends reconnect the real economy to the financial one. Industrial policy is expensive. It reshapes supply chains. It can be inflationary in the short term, even if it is disinflationary later. And it creates a temptation: If the transition is bumpy, lean on the central bank to smooth it.

South Africa sits inside the same comfort trap. The South African Reserve Bank has held the repo rate at 6.75%, but the inflation story is not only about Consumer Price Index prints. Electricity is a policy variable: Nersa’s revised Eskom increases (8.76% in April 2026 and 8.83% in April 2027) remind us that administered prices can reintroduce pressure just as investors start pricing in easing. Add the rand’s sensitivity to US rates and global risk appetite, and the “Fed put” reaches your household budget.

 

So, what should a South African investor take from this?

First, stop treating “puts” as permanent laws of nature. They are political choices, and politics change. Second, favour resilience over narratives: Strong balance sheets, real pricing power, and business models that do not require cheap funding to exist. Third, diversify across regimes, not just assets. The last decade rewarded a tidy regime with abundant liquidity, smooth supply chains, and low inflation. The next may reward a messier mix: Strategic reshoring, resource constraints, and a higher premium on credible policy and cash flow. Avoiding recessions is not free. If we keep paying for stability with debt, subsidies, and central-bank balance sheets, we are not eliminating cycles; we are storing them.

This article has been published on Moneyweb.

Financial well-being for every one

South Africa is facing a retirement crisis: Only about 4% of South Africans can retire comfortably, despite decades of saving, countless product options, and an industry built on promises of performance. If products alone were the solution, more people would be financially secure. They are not.

The reason for this is simple: Products are only part of the answer. Financial well-being cannot be bought in a product, no matter how impressive its performance appears to be. Most South Africans never receive truly independent, holistic advice – the kind of advice that considers their entire financial life, understands their risks and goals, and uses products as tools within a thoughtful, long-term plan.

Instead, advice often remains product-led and returns-focused, built around short-term promises that fail to meet long-term needs. Smaller financial services providers, in particular, still sell “guaranteed returns” that do not exist, leaving people exposed to and unaware of the risks. The result is predictable: People save, invest, and hope; yet still cannot retire comfortably.

 

The strategic shift to financial well-being

Financial well-being changes everything. It moves the focus from performance to purpose; from selling products to being financially secure, every day, and reaching personal financial objectives. And it starts with independent, holistic advice, supported by technology, that makes high-quality guidance accessible to more people than ever before.

We emphasise every one – two words, not one – because financial well-being is deeply personal. It is about each person’s journey, goals, and responsibilities. Historically, holistic advice was reserved for the privileged few. This is changing. Through technology, trusted expertise, and independence, this level of advice can now be delivered to all households (not just the wealthy).

 

What does financial well-being mean?

Financial well-being means feeling secure, confident, and in control of your money. It means meeting today’s needs, planning for tomorrow, and making decisions with clarity, not fear or misinformation. It is not about chasing the highest return; it is about ensuring your finances support the life you want – sustainably and responsibly.

We believe that if you can measure it, you can manage it. For too long, the industry has only measured performance, ignoring outcomes that matter most: Stability, resilience, peace of mind, and the ability to retire confidently. South Africans need to measure their financial well-being, so that they can improve it and take ownership of their financial future.

 

The fundamental shift

  • From product-first to client-first
  • From performance-driven to purpose-driven
  • From promises to partnership
  • From returns to real well-being

True financial well-being is built on understanding, planning, protection, and stewardship. It is about aligning money with values, safeguarding the future, and taking the next right step – one decision at a time.

When advice becomes independent, holistic, and measurable, the entire industry changes. Advice becomes more human, more honest, and more hopeful. And when every one begins to experience financial well-being, families and communities grow stronger.

Because financial well-being is not for a few. It is for every one.

 

India, the US, and the uneasy lesson for investors at the edge of the world

For most of the past 70 years, India was the global economy’s great ‘almost’. It had scale, democracy, and ambition, but never grew. Economists even coined a term for it: The “Hindu rate of growth”, a pace so slow that it feels culturally ordained. Today, something different is happening. And for South African investors, watching from another large, complex, often-frustrated emerging market, India’s story is more than a curiosity; it is a mirror.

India is growing at more than 8%, inflation has collapsed to near 1%, and fiscal deficits are shrinking. This is happening despite tariffs from Donald Trump, a weak currency, and foreign investors selling down Indian equities. The usual excuses (hostile global conditions, volatile capital flows, and political risk) are all present. And yet growth persists. Why? Because India has quietly aligned three forces that rarely move together: Luck, discipline, and reform.

Let us start with luck. Good monsoon rains matter more than most investors realise. Food makes up nearly half of India’s inflation basket. Two strong agricultural years pushed food prices down, lifted real incomes, and gave consumers room to spend. Lower inflation also flatters real gross domestic product growth. This reminds us how fragile growth can be when it depends on the weather rather than on institutions.

The second force is discipline. India cut its budget deficit from pandemic-era excesses and resisted the temptation to spend its way out of trouble. Even when tariffs hit, the response was targeted: Simplify taxes, bring forward infrastructure spend, and ease monetary policy only because inflation allowed it. The Reserve Bank of India allowed the currency to weaken rather than to burn reserves or to defend a political line in the sand. This is a reminder that sometimes flexibility, not stubbornness, is the more credible form of monetary discipline.

The third, and most important, shift is structural reform. India has cleaned up its banks, digitised payments, simplified labour laws, opened sectors to private capital, and, crucially, started dismantling its own protectionism. Tariffs are coming down, quality-control barriers are being rolled back, and trade deals are being signed.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: United States (US) tariffs forced India to reform faster. When easy growth disappeared, political resistance weakened. Reform became less risky than stagnation. That is a lesson many countries learn only after wasting a decade. Now, contrast this with the US, the supposed anchor of global markets: Investors complain endlessly about US deficits, trade wars, and political chaos. And yet money keeps flowing in. US equities dominate global portfolios. US bonds still attract buyers. Why? Because productivity, earnings growth, and technological leadership outweigh institutional decay. Markets are amoral. They follow cashflows, not constitutions.

This creates a global paradox. India is reforming into relevance. The US is drifting politically, but still compounding economically. Europe, stuck in between, is scrambling for trade partners and strategic autonomy. For investors, this means the world is not divided into ‘safe’ and ‘risky’ markets anymore. Risk now lies in complacency; in assuming yesterday’s winners will always be tomorrow’s.

For South Africans, the parallels are striking. Like India, we are (relatively) large, unequal, democratic, and administratively complex. Like India, we have world-class firms alongside failing institutions. And like India, we face a choice: Reform early and painfully, or drift until crisis removes the choice altogether.

India’s experience suggests something hopeful, but demanding. Growth is not primarily a function of ideology, foreign capital, or slogans. It comes from boring, persistent work: Fiscal restraint, credible central banks, functioning infrastructure, and rules that make investment easier rather than harder. Luck helps, but only if institutions are ready to receive it. Markets will forgive a lot. They will tolerate messy politics, noisy leaders, and even tariffs, until productivity falters. When this happens, the rotation out of assets is brutal. India is betting that reform now is cheaper than rescue later. Investors would do well to pay attention, not just to where growth is today, but to where discipline is being built for tomorrow.

 

Markets at a crossroads: Why 2026 will reward discipline, not drama

Every new year arrives with forecasts, bravado, and bold promises. Yet, this year does not seem like a year for noise. It seems like a year for judgement.

Markets enter 2026 shaped less by crisis and more by transition. The era defined by emergency policy, shock inflation, and aggressive tightening is giving way to something subtler: A recalibration of growth, capital costs, and expectations. For investors, this is not a moment for panic or euphoria, but for clarity.

The first theme shaping 2026 is interest rates: Not where they are, but how they will normalise from here. The tightening cycle that dominated the past few years has already turned. Both the Federal Reserve and the South African Reserve Bank have begun easing policy, acknowledging that inflation has moderated meaningfully from its peaks. The debate is no longer about whether cuts will happen, but about how far rates can fall without reigniting price pressures or destabilising currency and capital flows. The most likely outcome remains a gradual, data-dependent path: Supportive of asset prices, but unlikely to deliver the kind of liquidity surge seen after previous crises. Markets will reward patience and positioning, not rate-cut speculation.

Secondly, global growth is fragmenting rather than collapsing. The United States continues to surprise on the upside, supported by productivity gains, fiscal investment, and corporate adaptability. Europe remains uneven, but for different reasons than in recent years. Energy prices, particularly in Germany, have come down sharply, easing inflationary pressure and restoring some industrial competitiveness. The more persistent constraints now lie in demographics, productivity, and fiscal flexibility. China, meanwhile, is no longer a reliable engine of global acceleration, but a stabilising force navigating structural rebalancing. For investors, this fragmentation reinforces a key reality: Returns will be driven less by global beta and more by regional and sectoral selection.

Closer to home, South Africa enters the year with measured optimism and familiar limits. Improved energy availability, incremental reform, and pragmatic fiscal signals matter, not because they guarantee high growth, but because they restore a degree of policy credibility. Markets respond less to promises than to follow-through. For investors, this means focusing on resilience: Businesses and assets that can compound value even when domestic growth remains constrained.

A third defining theme is the repricing of risk, quality, and execution, particularly in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). The era of ‘growth at any price’ has given way to a far more demanding environment. Capital is increasingly selective about how technology translates into earnings. AI is no longer rewarded simply as a concept; it must practically improve productivity, margins, or competitive positioning. Balance sheets matter again. Cash flow matters. Governance matters. This is especially important as global equity indices sit near all-time highs, driven by a narrow concentration of mega-cap leaders. The opportunity set is not disappearing; it is becoming more unforgiving of weak fundamentals and vague narratives.

Technology remains a powerful long-term force, but the next phase belongs to companies that integrate innovation into real economic outcomes, not those that merely promise disruption. Investors should expect dispersion to increase: Winners will separate themselves decisively from the rest.

 

What should investors expect from the year ahead?

Not runaway returns, but solid, risk-adjusted outcomes. Not smooth progress, but periodic volatility that creates opportunity. Not a single winning asset class, but the steady compounding of diversified, well-constructed portfolios.

For investors, more broadly, the priorities remain consistent: Protect purchasing power, grow real wealth over time, and retain flexibility. This requires global exposure, disciplined asset allocation, and the humility to accept that markets will surprise us (as they always do).

The greatest risk in 2026 is not volatility, but complacency. The greatest advantage is being prepared.

In a world adjusting to lower (but not cheap) capital, uneven growth, and higher expectations of quality, this will be a year that rewards discipline far more than drama.

This article has been published on Moneyweb.

2025: The year that changed how we think about money

As 2025 draws to a close, one truth stands out: This was the year the world finally accepted that the economic landscape has permanently changed. Markets were more volatile, geopolitics moved prices on a weekly basis, and deep structural shifts forced investors to rethink what “normal” means. So, what happened in 2025?

 

Our world adjusted to a structural reality

At the start of 2025, many expected rapid interest-rate cuts and a return to the low-inflation environment of the past decade. Instead, the world confronted a different truth: Inflation is no longer only cyclical; it is structural. Trillions are being invested in energy transition, new supply chains, semiconductor capacity, and enormous artificial intelligence and data-centre infrastructure. The future is simply more expensive than the past. Markets also rewarded companies that generated real cash flow and real value. Performance without substance was no longer enough.

 

Geopolitics became an economic variable

Although 2025 was not a major global election year, the after-effects of political shifts in the United States, Europe, and Asia shaped trade expectations, regulation, and investor sentiment. Energy security, rivalry in the technology sector, and supply-chain realignments became daily market drivers. Geopolitics stopped being background noise; it became the rhythm that markets traded on.

 

2025 was a challenging but decisive year for South Africa (SA)

Although SA faced pressure, the past year was far more constructive than expected:

  • Grey-listing progress and improved credibility: SA completed the reforms required to drop off the Financial Action Task Force’s grey list, strengthening financial oversight and enforcement. Even before the final announcement, global markets responded positively.
  • Credit-rating momentum turned positive: For the first time in years, a leading ratings agency upgraded SA’s outlook, citing improvements in fiscal discipline, better energy stability, and early signs of logistics reform. While we remain below investment grade, SA’s direction has finally shifted upward.
  • Stronger markets and a more resilient rand: Government bond yields fell to multi-year lows as confidence improved. Local equities benefitted from global rallies and domestic reform momentum. While volatile, the rand traded much stronger than during the most uncertain phases of the year.

The case for financial well-being

All of this brings us back to a message that we have emphasised for years: Financial well-being cannot be bought in a product. While products and performance matter, a product is only ever one piece of a much larger picture. It cannot understand your life, your responsibilities, or your long-term goals. That is why clients often feel the industry is product-driven: The product gets sold but the real need behind the decision is never fully understood.

Our differentiator is clear: We deliver holistic, independent financial advice (enhanced with technology) that clarifies a client’s true financial needs and builds a complete, unique solution around them. That is financial well-being for every one.

Holistic advice reveals the real purpose behind the decision: It is not what you want to buy but why you need it and what outcome it must achieve. Independence ensures that the solution serves the client, not a product’s agenda. And technology allows us to integrate, monitor, and adapt the plan over time, making this level of clarity accessible to more people than ever before.

The combination of holistic + independent + technology-enabled turns products into meaningful components of a broader strategy. It connects decisions to outcomes. And, ultimately, it is a complete, well-designed solution that makes clients financially well.

 

Looking ahead

If 2025 was the year the world accepted change, 2026 will be the year investors must decide how to respond to it. Holistic advice will shift from “nice to have” to essential. Technology will reshape access and insight. And those who prioritise financial well-being over market noise will be the ones who thrive.

We thank you for your trust, your partnership, and your continued support during the past year. We look forward to building a stronger, wiser, and financially healthier future, together!

This article has been published on Moneyweb.

Making the most of Black Friday

Black Friday has become one of the most prominent retail events in South Africa, offering the chance to secure meaningful savings when approached with intention. Rather than viewing it as a period of pressure or financial risk, this season can be used strategically to support your long-term financial wellbeing.
At Efficient Group, we believe that confident financial decisions start with clarity, planning and a strong understanding of your priorities. This guide is designed to help you navigate Black Friday in a way that aligns with your broader financial goals.

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the Global Economy is Shifting but Are We Ready?

Global markets are sending mixed (and revealing) signals. Wall Street’s biggest dealmakers are busy again. Former ‘problem’ European countries have become disciplined. The United States (US) Federal Reserve (Fed) is pushing back against hopes for endless rate cuts. For South African investors, these are not just foreign headlines. They hint at where the next shocks to growth, inflation, and interest rates may come from.

 

Deals are back, and this matters

Goldman Sachs is on track to advise on around a third of global mergers and acquisitions announced this year, its strongest grip on the deals market in almost a decade. You do not get a multi-trillion-dollar M&A pipeline if boardrooms are terrified. You get it when large companies believe that buying growth and market share still pays. For South Africa (SA), this is a reminder that while our news flow is dominated by load shedding, logistics bottlenecks, and political instability, significant parts of the global economy are already positioning for the next expansion, not the next crisis. The world’s largest corporations are not waiting to see how things turn out; they are acting on conviction.

 

Spain, the ‘saint’; Germany, the ‘sinner’?

Seventeen years after the Eurozone debt crisis, the old narrative has been turned on its head. Spain (once bundled with Greece and Portugal as fiscally reckless) is now on course to run smaller budget deficits than Germany. Growth, tourism, immigration, and targeted public investment have pushed Spain’s deficit towards 2.3% of its gross domestic product. Germany’s, meanwhile, is rising as it belatedly repairs years of underinvestment in railways, bridges, defence, industry, and energy. The lesson for SA is uncomfortable but essential: You cannot cut your way to prosperity, and you cannot borrow your way there either. Countries that combine credible fiscal anchors with pro-growth investment get rewarded. Those who rely on slogans, consumption spending, and short-term fixes eventually pay more to borrow. They also have far less room to manoeuvre when the next shock hits.

 

The Fed reminds markets who is in charge

After two rate cuts in a row, investors were convinced that a third was on its way in December. Then, several Fed members pushed back, warning that inflation is still above target and that, with limited economic data owing to the US government shutdown, cutting too aggressively would be reckless. The reaction was immediate: Short-term bond yields ticked higher and equities wobbled. For emerging markets like SA, a slower pace of US easing likely means a firmer dollar, tighter global liquidity, and more vulnerability in local risk assets every time sentiment turns.

 

When steak becomes a macro story

One of the more unusual inflation stories this year centres around beef. Years of drought, high feed and fertiliser costs, disease outbreaks, and now tariffs have shrunk cattle herds across major producers. Supply is tight, demand is stubborn, and politics is amplifying the squeeze. Beef prices have hit record highs. The response is a case study in how not to manage a supply-side shock. South Africans know this pattern well. When food or fuel prices spike, the poorest households suffer first and for the longest time. Climate volatility and policy mistakes are now a combined risk factor for food inflation everywhere.

 

The big picture for SA

Put all this together, and a theme emerges. We are moving into a world where capital is more selective, central banks are less willing to underwrite asset prices, and countries that get the growth/debt balance right are rewarded faster than before. For South African investors, that is both a warning and an opportunity. The easy-money era is behind us but disciplined capital, independent advice, and a long-term view have rarely mattered more. The real question is whether we treat these global signals as background noise, or as a mirror showing us what we urgently need to change at home.

This article has been published on Moneyweb.