No worries - the euro woes are all Greek to us

Jeremy Thomas: You, along with just about everybody else in South Africa, may be wondering why we seem to have escaped the fallout from the long-running saga affecting certain sun-kissed European nations.

The reason might just be a lot more boring and mundane than you imagine. Quite simply, the big money is already looking through the problem and finding new avenues to exploit.

It became clear this week that America's corporate mandarins had more important things on their mind than the impending collapse of Greece, Spain, Portugal and the rest of them. More than one commentator has scoffed at the size of the Greek debt pile, for instance - it ranks low on the scale of calamities compared to the recent credit meltdown, barely worth mentioning when compared to the domino effect that the Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns catastrophes potentially had on global markets.

No, this week the canny American gaze turned inwards. What was most pressing on the agenda wasn't the implosion of the eurozone, but something a lot more prosaic ... and deemed much more critical.

Company earnings. When all is said and done, money follows winners, and the obsession of the week was the performance of the Dow's heavyweights. They don't come a lot bigger than these, all of whom reported their results in the past five days: Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, Unilever, Bristol-Myers Squib, AstraZeneca, International Paper, Eastman Kodak, Kellogg and Burger King. Exxon Mobil's earnings surged 38% to $6.3-billion. The S&P index rose above the key 1200 level. Sorry to say, but the real dollars had their eyes averted from Europe this week.

It may come as a shock to us. After all, we like to see Europe as our country cousins, and what ails them could be seen to ail us. Not so much. When the chequebooks came out this week, they were looking for new places to play.

Once the mega-fund managers had made sure their blue chips were safe and sound (US company results were, for the most part, extremely encouraging), they naturally started looking for "sweeteners".

Markets move on emotions, and a nice way to keep track of the swoons and gasps is to watch the news wires. This week, among all the grim stuff about Europe and the hurrahs about US corporate earnings, was a mass of information about African markets. To one who spends his days watching the wires, it was intriguing.

Why, suddenly, were analysts pouring out their opinions on destinations as exotic as Uganda (economy expected to grow by 7%-8% in 2010/11), Angola (plans to raise spending in 2010 by 19% to $36-billion from the previous year), and Zambia (renewed interest after a surge in copper prices)?

No surprise, really. Big returns only ever come after big risks are taken, and Africa - including South Africa - has jumped onto the world's radar. The JSE is up, the rand is strong and the rabid scrounging for real yield is very much on.

Deep in the engine rooms of Wall Street and the City of London, in the bunkers where the giant sovereign wealth funds of Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, China, Singapore, Kuwait and Russia tick over, they're finding new ways to make fortunes.

Far from being pessimistic, we should be jumping up and down. So chins up, then, chaps.