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notsosmug

Listed below are comments made by notsosmug between Monday, 2nd March 2009 and Tuesday, 26th May 2009.

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Sudden jump in number of cases 9:47pm on 26 May 2009 I suppose our anxiety should focus on cases which haven't been traced. If the virus is really generally not much nastier than a bad cold, then it would be no great surprise to find that some casual contact of a victim (someone who stood by them on the tube, or queued near them in a shop) was wandering around, innocently spreading the virus. No-one would bother having the bug identified until, in a few months time, with a few hundred more untraceable cases in circulation, someone happened to die; by then, control would have become all-but impossible.
On a similar note, I can't help noticing that there have been no recorded cases in Africa. If that's an accurate reflection of events, then that's excellent news - but what if it isn't? My guess is that any real crisis will stem from the development of a reservoir of infection in a less developed nation which doesn't have the resources to recognise or monitor the disease, from which it can be re-exported round the world.
A week or so ago, a medical researcher suggested that one third of the world's population might contract the disease, and that the morality rate might be, I think, 4 in 1,000. Everyone shrugged, of course - but that does suggest the death, in this country alone, of 80,000 people. That's not so very mich worse than a bad outbreak of seasonal flu - but it IS worse, and I'd be very interested to know if the estimate is considered credible - and what the likely social and economic impact might be.
Economic impact of swine flu 10:35am on 01 May 2009 15. At 6:12pm on 30 Apr 2009, funkyblogger wrote:
I must say I find the whole article ghoulish and poorly founded... I do question whether an economic analysis ... serves any real purpose other than to further hype up the story...'

XXXX

Call me naive, but I do wish people read the blogs they complained about. How can you reconcile this comment with this characteristic line from the blog itself?

"Ill-informed optimism is no better than ill-informed gloom. But if we are looking at something on the scale of the Sars issue now, my guess is that the same will be true this time. The costs will be less than some now fear. "

How, exactly,is a suggestion that the crisis has been over-estimated compatioble with an accusation of 'hyp[ing] up the story'?
Hobbling hedgies and bashing buyout boys 10:37am on 30 Apr 2009 I know this is totally irrelevant, but I'd urgently like an answer to quite a simple but wide-ranging question. What the hell is going on?

I haven't read a single positive response to the budget; the Government looks distinctly frayed about the edges; as far as I can see, taxes will rise much more than has been announced so far, while unemployment rises and services are slashed back; American GDP is down 6% this year, with house prices falling, still; about a third of America's banks seem to have failed the recent 'stress test'; a lot of European economies are doing a pretty good impersonation of Ireland; we're on the verge of a pandemic which my well hit developing countries (whose economies look the most reliable source of growth worldwide) particularly hard...

and shares are going up and up.

Why? Has all this really been 'priced into the market'?

Yours bemusedly...
Reversion to the extreme 1:10pm on 27 Apr 2009
With apologies to EJ Thribb...

So farewell then, New Labour.
'Things can only get better' - that was
your catchphrase.
'No more boom and bust' -
that was another.
Now you are spinning
in your grave.
Tesco: Not quite infallible 11:41am on 21 Apr 2009 At 11:18am on 21 Apr 2009, VentilatorBlues wrote:
Good news but hardly astounding - Its total debt has gone up from ?8 billion to ?9.6 billion.

Is that really true? Ventilator Blues suggests it's a frightening figure if we are now moving into a deflationary world. Isn't it even worse if we get the other likely outcome of quantitative easing, which is a spike in inflation and a rapid rise in interest rates? When that happens, although the value of the debt itself will fall, we can expect to see demand fall off yet another cliff, and bad debts proliferate, just when the company's debts become more expensive to service.
The point about bad debts is important, given this move in to the financial sector. I've seen this described as a return to old-fashioned retail banking - but it's hardly the old-fashioned business of ahaving a manager who knows how many kids you've got and worries about your overdraft, is it?
Treasury wants to cut pensions tax break 11:33am on 21 Apr 2009 I see the grouching about public sector pensions is as vicious as ever.

I don't work in the public sector; for years, I have justified my relatively high pay on the grounds that I am being rewarded for my exposure to risk. I've accepted that public sector workers, having accepted relatively low pay (as the penalty for their security and also as a reflection of their sheer altruism), are compensated by being offered a pension which should mean that they won't live out their old age in abject poverty. Given my higher pay, I was in a position to save towards my old age.
Given that I was so smug about my courageous willingness to brave the risks of the free market economy, I would be ashamed to start bitching about those pensions now that things have gone bad. I would be even more ashamed to ask the nation's nurses and state school teachers, who have spent years doing jobs I haven't got the nerve or heart to do, to subsidise me now. Their pensions were part of the deal when they signed on.
I know, of course, that there are too many managers and administrators in several public services - but that is a rather different question.
China: All about jobs 4:18pm on 04 Mar 2009 #78. Sorry - I was probably being pompous!

The truth is that I've more or less given up on thinking I really understand the big picture, so am quite possibly over-impressed by local colour.

I do get wound up by all the moaning in these posts about the cost of sending journalists out to China, though. If the BBC can subsidise Jonathan Ross's career as a phone pest and send out scores of tongue-tied ex-sportsmen to cover the opening ceremony at the Olympics, I don't see why they shouldn't fork out for someone to actually do a bit of research.
China: All about jobs 12:07pm on 04 Mar 2009 #45: 'It is no more than a snapshot in time of one aspect of what is going on.'

Fair enough, but isn't that one meaning of the word 'journalism'?

One common criticism of our financial and analytical elite is that they fell so in love with the numbers that they forgot to look at the real lives and experiences of ordinary people. Isn't that why we value, among other things, the chance to read the comments here?

There's a sad posting, for example, by someone who has been made redundant today; from a statistical point of view you could argue that that means nothing - individuals lose their jobs during booms, too - but it fleshes out the statistics in an important way. Similarly, it's all very well to watch the unemployment figures (or the data on share prices) from China, but they become much more meaningful in both emotional and analytical terms if you have some picture of those affected.

When shares fall, we might easily just think of wealth being stripped from besuited self-made men - but the victims are, it seems, just as likely to be living not far above subsistence level. We think we know what job losses look like and about what impact they will have - but being given a snapshot of a life in which it is worth travelling thousands of miles to earn a few pounds a day - and in which even that income can then be lost - surely gives us a better sense of why all this matters, and how things may play out in the future.

In the same way, I've never forgotten reading Steinbeck's account of a squatter camp in Depression-era America. He met so many families whose children had died of hunger that he could, in the end, guess how many they had lost just by looking at them. Having read that, the idea of the Depression - and the role it had in shaping, for example, American attitudes to money - became much more real to me. It still shapes my political instincts today.

So - more journalistic snapshots, please. If we've never looked at the detail, the big picture will mean nothing.
Red capitalism 3:38pm on 03 Mar 2009 A number of people seem to be moaning that Robert Peston is in China. Last week some of the same people were moaning because all we ever heard about was bonuses.

One way or the other, the path taken by the Chinese economy is going to be incredibly important to the whole international finanical and political system. It is, potentially, just as important to us as what is happening in America. If it went very wrong, you might well end up seeing the odd war (Taiwan, anyone? Korea? or just a little internal difficulty in the Islamic provinces?); and if it goes as well as it might, businesses here might find new markets opening up - or new competitors emerging just at the time that we're weakest.

If there's one thing I'd perfectly happy to see my licence fee spent on, it's the relativfely minor expense of sending the BBC's Business Editor to China. And when he's finished there, a couple of weeks in Russia or in India wouldn't go amiss.
The big borrowers 09:53am on 02 Mar 2009 I'm glad to see you focusing on this area, not least because I have a nagging fear that we could see democratic governments fall on (at least) the Eastern fringes of Europe.

I was interested to read about the possible impact of all this on the Austrian economy - but am I right to be worrying about the implications of all this for the Irish? I understand that a lot of the money invested in property in the newer members of the EU came from Ireland and, given the frailty of their economy already, I can't help thinking that a wave of defaults on loans related to the crash in the East will hit already vulnerable Irish banks very hard.

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