Real Estate Investor Magazine South Africa April 2015 | Page 7

INVESTOR TALK

Change Your Misery Index to change your Fortune

W

e have regularly
covered the critical
importance
of
successful investing through
creativity, imagination and
a positive mindset to master
the inner game of investment.
These factors are the things
that can significantly change
our investment outcome
over and above the standard
Return On Investment’s
(ROI’s), yields and cashon-cash returns of a typical
property investment. One of
the key practices in protecting
our mindset is constantly
exposing us to positive input
from selected media choices that can grow our thoughts
and limit constant negative daily news. A new index that
has been created can assist in playing a role in controlling
that practice.
This index is one you do not want to be on the top.
It has been released recently by Steve Hanke, Professor
of Applied Economics at John Hopkins University and
is called the Worldwide Misery Index. He uses a simple
sum of inflation, lending rates, and unemployment rates,
minus year-on-year per capita Growth Domestic Product
(GDP) growth to construct a ranking of misery for
108 countries from across the globe. Not surprisingly,
South Africa was ranked 10th highest in the world with
Brunei, Switzerland, China, Taiwan and Japan. One of
the main factors pulling SA down is the extremely high

FROM THE PUBLISHER

unemployment rate, while these successful countries have
low inflation, high employment rates and a high GDP.
The Economic Freedom Foundation reckon that if the
unemployed are exempted from labour laws to relieve
fears of heavy legal costs for contravention of labour
laws of small businesses. This can dramatically increase
the rate of hiring if the unemployed can make their own
decisions about terms of work wages. Small businesses
have restrictive wage, hiring and firing bureaucracy costs,
collective bargaining, as well as admin requirements and
regulations. These few things can help entrepreneurs
operate more freely by opening up more employment,
upskilling staff, capital and prosperity and getting people
to foc