During the week, Eskom announced that the public would have to stop using so much electricity otherwise there would be load shedding; a fine sentiment but don't tell people what they can't do, rather tell them that they would be doing everyone a great service by being economical.

If you put the power back in their hands, so to speak, you might get better results.

Staying on the subject of power, or rather those struggling to keep it, Khutso Mampeule, former CEO of the Post Office was fired early last week, following a suspension and an investigation into his conduct.

Minister of Communication Dr Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri, fired him after a report into his conduct resulted in her losing trust in him, because he had brought a criminal charge against his predecessor, Maanda Manyatshe, without first consulting the Post Office board.

He told Moneyweb that what he did was a requirement by law under the Prevention Of Corrupt And Criminal Activities Act: "Anybody in a position of authority, like myself, who becomes aware of any evidence of wrongdoing ought to report that matter to the police for further investigation, and for the police to do whatever they deem fit. So it's a requirement for any office holder of authority to carry out that function. If I had not done that, I would have failed to carry out my fiduciary responsibilities and therefore I would have gotten myself into trouble."

It looks like he got himself into trouble anyway; ironically the minister of communication was unavailable to speak to us that night.

Speaking of ministers - Finance Minister, Trevor Manuel, and his deputy Jabu Moleketi, came out against breeches of trust in the financial services industry and bandied about, albeit, not in so many words, the notion of a "Super Regulator".

In his budget address to parliament, Manuel said "the state needs to adopt a more aggressive stance" when industry leaders fail to regulate themselves or their colleagues efficiently.

He added: "There is an urgency in the need for co-ordinated, co-operative and partnership efforts by the relevant supervisory bodies, such as the Banking Supervisor and the Financial Services Board, working jointly with the FIC [Financial Intelligence Centre] and Sars [the South African Revenue Services]. I expect to see them co-ordinating their efforts with each other, actively sharing information with the FIC and Sars, and adopting an aggressive attitude to all those who operate outside of the spirit and letter of the law".

Moleketi, in his address added, that in order to close regulatory gaps that helped allow unscrupulous service providers to thrive "a co-ordinated response across regulators, together with increased capacity to enforce the law substantially" would be required.

He said that all regulators and agencies involved in the financial sector, including the FSB, FAIS Ombud, the FIC and Sars, "have a collective responsibility to ratchet-up their enforcement efforts".

Another figure that seems to have lost a little of his power is Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, previously a comment by him that the Chinese stock market is overheating would have resulted in significant market movements but, when he warns of a possible "dramatic contraction" of the Chinese market, and it only falls 0,5% then one begins to wonder.

That or what he said is not particularly profound, As Martin Davis, Executive Director of the Centre for Chinese Studies at the University of Stellenbosch said: "any analyst will know that the Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange are pretty much like casinos, where your risk is probably lower at a casino than what it is on the Chinese markets. Its corporate governance is very, very bad. Recent movements in the stock markets downwards in, I think it was, February, were very much indicators of increased volatility to come, because at the moment it's very much a bubble.

The bubble aside, the country was also in the news for another reason last week. It handed over $3bn of its $1,2trn in foreign reserves to US Private Equity Firm Blackstone.

Asked about this monetary gun show, Davis explained to Moneyweb that there is a lot more of that financial muscle to come, "if one adds to that figure over $2trn in personal savings another, maybe, $1,5trn -plus in corporate savings, of particularly state-owned enterprises and, increasingly, private enterprises, China is an exceedingly wealthy nation. The problem being it's not very effective in how it spends its money beyond infrastructure and tall buildings and Shanghai and the main cities. What we are seeing is China is looking to diversify its finances into international markets, and we will increasingly see these monies invested possibly into international securities and equities."

Staying international, there was also a great story in the Wall Street Journal this week about Barack Obama's presidential campaign and the ways he is using social networking internet sites to help it along.

Sites such as Myspace and Facebook where people create their own pages filled with their favourite music, books, and pictures and use them to connect with their friends and like minded individuals are among the fastest growing sites in the world, drawing, according to the WSJ, 111m unique visitors to their sites in April alone.

WSJ reports that the internet is so important to the Obama campaign that it has employed one of the founders of Facebook, Chris Hughes, to help find better ways of harnessing the potential of the usually fickle youth audience.

Dubbed MyBO for short the campaign centres on its own social networking site my.barackobama.com, which aims at mobilising its audience to fundraise and campaign for Obama.

As power shifts, from capitalists to former communists, from old-school-tie-industrialists to 23-year-old, idealism-filled Internet moguls, one hopes that Eskom can ensure that power shifts, uninterrupted, to the homes of millions of cold South Africans.