17 Aug 2012

Rand remains softer at midday

I-Net Bridge

Johannesburg – The rand maintained a softer bias at noon‚ with market players choosing to focus on the potential spillover effects of the Lonmin [JSE:LON] violence into other mining companies.

Mark Kalkwarf‚ senior portfolio manager at Iquad Group‚ said the local currency decoupled from the euro/US dollar strength after German’s chancellor Angela Merkel became the latest eurozone high profile to approve of some stimulus measures for the euro.

At 12:16 local time the rand was bid at R8.2909 to the dollar from Thursday’s close of R8.2198. It was bid at R10.2409 to the euro from its previous close of R10.1558 and at R13.0059 against sterling from R12.9241 before.

The euro was bid at $1.2363 from $1.2355.

The violence at Lonmin’s Marikana mine in the North West could scare away foreign investment‚ according to some analysts‚ believing the violence could spread to other mining sectors and hurt employment‚ when nearly a quarter of the country’s work force is unemployed.

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