Fuel went up again today. The Department of Mineral Resources and Energy confirmed petrol 95 will climb 68 cents a litre on Wednesday. Diesel jumps even more. Taxi fares are already rising. Bread will follow next week. Even airtime feels heavier in the pocket. People curse Eskom or the ANC or the DA. The real culprit sits quietly on trading screens. It is the rand.

Forex trading desks in Sandton and Cape Town have never had it so good. The rand shot from R17.20 to the dollar in early July to nearly R19.50 in the first week of November. Then it snapped back to R18.30 in three frantic days. Those wild swings are champagne moments for anyone holding USD/ZAR positions. Local retail brokers say new account openings in October and November beat every record since 2021. Yet the same roller-coaster is quietly wrecking the budgets of millions of households.

Step back and the picture looks ugly. Global investors hit the panic button after the US election. Donald Trump talks openly about 20 percent tariffs on everything that is not made in America. China’s factories are running below capacity. When the world gets nervous, money floods into the US dollar. South Africa stands near the front of the queue for punishment. Our current account deficit is still close to 3 percent of GDP. Foreigners own almost 40 percent of our government bonds. One bad headline and the sell orders rain down.

The Reserve Bank tried to soften the blow. Governor Lesetja Kganyago shocked markets with two straight 50 basis-point cuts in September and November. The repo rate now sits at 7.50 percent, the lowest in more than four years. In textbooks a weaker currency should follow lower rates. Exporters should cheer. Gold mines, fruit farmers and car plants should be booking extra orders. Reality laughed. The rand weakened anyway, driven purely by fear rather than interest-rate differentials. Customers overseas simply freeze when the price in dollars jumps around by 5 percent in a single month.

At home the pain arrives fast. Every extra rand it costs to buy a dollar gets added straight to the petrol price. The Automobile Association calculates that roughly 42 percent of the fuel price is now the exchange rate effect. Wheat for bread, soy oil for cooking, chemicals for fertilizer – all priced in dollars. Stats SA reported last week that food and non-alcoholic beverages rose 6.4 percent year-on-year in October. That is the highest reading in eighteen months even though global grain prices are actually falling.

Small and medium businesses are bleeding quietly. A panel beater in Pretoria North showed me invoices last week. The price of imported automotive paint jumped 22 percent between August and November. He tried to absorb half of it. His monthly profit vanished. A clothing factory in Newcastle laid off 48 machinists because the dollar cost of imported thread and zippers suddenly ate the entire margin on school uniforms. Multiply those stories by tens of thousands and you understand why the formal economy created almost no new jobs in the third quarter.

Farmers are not celebrating either. Yes, a weaker rand makes deciduous fruit cheaper in Europe. But most growers locked in forward contracts six months ago when the rand was still near R17.80. Now they deliver at R18.90 and watch the extra rands disappear into higher diesel, fertilizer and packing material bills. Net gain close to zero. Table grape exporters in the Hex River Valley told industry bodies they expect profits to fall by a third this season.

The Government of National Unity was supposed to calm nerves. Investors wanted one clear message on property rights, spending discipline and energy policy. Instead they still hear conflicting voices. One coalition partner talks about prescribed assets. Another wants to print money for a basic income grant. Every weekend brings a new leaked document or fiery speech. Global fund managers do not wait for clarity. They simply press sell and move on to Poland or Mexico.

There is no magic button. The rand will only settle when two things happen at once. The world must stop panicking about tariffs and recession. And South Africa must stop handing the world fresh reasons to panic. Until then the trading screens will keep flashing red and green while ordinary people pay more for everything they need.

One day the chart will go flat again. That day still feels very far away.