WORLDVIEW: Ahead of SONA address – investment advice from Rudyard Kipling

By Alec Hogg.A little career highlight came yesterday when I spent 15 minutes on the blower with former US Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. He's the star attraction of a conference I'm facilitating later this month, and wanted to get a feeling of how his section of it would run..He comes across as focused and engaged, as one might expect of a man who controlled the world's money markets for eight years. Watching him field our questions is going to be special. Particularly about the challenges now faced by his former colleague Janet Yellen..___STEADY_PAYWALL___.For those with short memories, it was Bernanke who guided the global economy back from the potential meltdown we now call the Great Financial Crisis. During his terms he dealt with two very different Presidents in George W Bush and Barack Obama – but is sure to have empathy with Yellen who has an altogether different commander-in-chief on her back..Preparing for the assignment brought back memories of the panicked mood of 2008, a period matched only by 9/11 when business activity worldwide froze. But both times, normality did return and investors who held their nerve reaped the benefits. Most publicly Warren Buffett who acted on his own advice to get greedy when everyone else is fearful..Buffett absorbed this during his first big win in the mid-1960s when he bet the infamous "Salad Oil scandal" wouldn't damage American Express as much as Mr Market projected. Buffett invested half his partnership's funds, $13m at the time, in scooping up plummeting Amex shares, accumulating 5% of the business. That investment is now worth $10bn..These stories are designed to prepare you for President Jacob Zuma's State of the Nation Address tomorrow night. He gave little away talking to a lunch for business executives yesterday. But the rumour mill keeps suggesting a cabinet reshuffle with Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan "redeployed" – sparking another financial crisis of Nenegate proportions..This talk has been doing the rounds since mid-December with first Brian Molefe and then Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma touted as PG's replacement. Some usually reliable sources are fretting that pressure on Gordhan ratcheted up over the past two weeks, means a big move is on the cards. At the very least, they say, his whistleblowing deputy Mcebisi Jonas will be fired..Jonas may well go, but everything else tells us Gordhan will not. Zuma is aware such a move would send the wrong message to foreign investors and totally alienate SA Big Business. Also, Zuma has confirmed his visit to the UK next week to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the sinking of SS Mendi where more than 600 black SA troops died. Zuma would surely hate to have the occasion marred by the controversy a PG exit would trigger..But one never knows. If another Nenegate is visited upon us tomorrow, investors should see it as an opportunity. And take some advice from British Nobel laureate Rudyard Kipling's timeless poem: "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs…Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it."

WORLDVIEW: Ahead of SONA address – investment advice from Rudyard Kipling

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