Discover the year’s most compelling After the Bell columns, merging wit and insight on economics, innovation and accountability, capturing the essence of our ever-changing world. Over the last year, it has been my absolute pleasure and privilege to oversee the After the Bell columns written by two great journalism minds — the inimitable Tim Cohen and the legendary Stephen Grootes. Some columns arrive like a polite email.
Others kick down the door, borrow your kettle, and leave you staring at the ceiling at 2am (no, really, they did) thinking about tariffs, trust and the price of a single good idea. This year’s best After the Bell pieces by Tim Cohen and Stephen Grootes did the latter. They weren’t just “takes”.
They were little operating manuals for living in an economy where the rules keep changing, the referees are missing, and everyone’s pretending the scoreboard is optional. Trying to single out some of the best offerings this year was difficult, to say the least. First up was Tim’s “Nǐ hǎo and some green tea please before the auto trade war” that hit our inboxes on 6 January.
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While Tim’s witty columns often made for good humour, there was a serious warning. The rise of Chinese carmakers was a story that could (and has) affected supply chains, politics, labour markets and South Africa’s own auto story. It was less about cars and more about energy choices with headlights; geopolitics, you could finance over 72 months.
Tim basically asked the question no one wants to hear: Are we preparing for the future, or merely importing it? The following month, he shone a light on a tale of two assets in “Gold vs Bitcoin: a crucial arm-wrestling match still to be decided” (16 February). Gold is the old god: heavy, inert, reassuring, while Bitcoin has increasingly emerged as what you could think of as the new religion: volatile, narrative-driven, powered by code and conviction. In a year of uncertainty, the column asked: What do you trust when trust is the scarce commodity?
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