Bloomberg:

Feb. 9 — South African construction stocks were raised to “neutral” from “underweight” at JPMorgan Chase & Co., which cited “compelling” valuations.

“The South Africa construction sector has significantly underperformed the equity-market recovery since March 2009 and we believe that the cycle for the sector is at, or very close to, the bottom,” analysts Deanne Gordon and Ayan Ghosh wrote in a note to clients today. “Construction-sector valuations are compelling and appear to be pricing in a worst-case scenario.”

The 12-member FTSE/JSE Africa Construction & Building Materials Index rose 0.3 percent to 48.98 as of 1:05 p.m. in Johannesburg, and trades at 7.94 times earnings. The shares have dropped 7.5 percent this year, compared with a 5.3 percent slide in the broader FTSE/JSE Africa All Share Index, which trades at 22.81 times earnings.

A passage from the Bible of economic reason:

Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the co-operative form of the labor-process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labor into instruments of labor only usable in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined, socialized labor, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world-market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime.

The Mudedes in Jozi are as entangled as the Mudedes in Seattle.