Flashback

Interesting to review my own take on things two years ago.
E.g. about this new tablet thing called iPad.

In Europe though nothing has changed - at least not for the better.

Cold again

Snow here yesterday and according to Krugman, Roubini, Faber and other pundits we may be in for a very long and very cold summer.

Now is the time for the pension fund to buy gold and sunny Greek islands.

Super Hero II

The tech turd turned out a huge commercial success. Still waiting for the Super Hero though.

Snow and Sluggish Recovery

The bitter cold and heavy snow fall around Europe and in the States seem to coincide with a very sluggish recovery indeed from the financial crisis. Greece and Spain are in great trouble for different reasons. Iceland is still struggling and others are running up huge debt. A very wide u dip.

China or Norway seem to be the places to be just now.

Remember the winter God? I say no more.

Can it last?

Just back from my first visit to Western Cape. I can hardly believe what I saw.

Very good roads.
Picturesque little towns with Dutch architecture.
Place names in Dutch, English and German.
Well run farms.
Affluent suburbs.
Good restaurants.
Excellent wineries.
Lots of busy people working, shopping.

This could be France, Germany or any European country.
But it is not. It is Africa - an Africa without black people.

Where are they?
Where do they - 80% of the country's population - live?

In Cape Town the answer is Khayelitsha township where more than two million still live the lecacy of Apartheid.
Segregated. Poor. In rickety shacks with few amenities. Hardly any transport to work and little work to be had.

There are many more like it all over the region.

Today, 16 years after the first ANC government took office there is still optimism but little change.

Why is that?

The Miser Index claims that a 1 per cent tax increase could eradicate poverty in South Africa.

Why does it not happen?

For how long will the majority be pacified by inadequate housing schemes and other morcels?

When will they claim a fair share of the land?

Zimbabwe got the redistribution of wealth all wrong.

Sout Africa must do it differently.

But they have to do it.

They are sitting on a time bomb.

I want to decide for myself which door to enter

MSN's UK portal has received much acclaim in a recent article in the Independent- and rightly so. It is is well designed, is very versatile and does pathbreaking stuff in its treatment of news. One of the best out there. But does it really give us/me what we are looking for? Is it so different from a thousand others that I would have it as my start page? The answer of course depends on who you are and whether it is versatility or tailor seam you are after.

Personally, with Google, Wiki, Free Dict and all the papers I need at my fingertips on the toolbar, my conclusion is bespoke. Versatility is the very nature of the internet and I find it a nuisance being automatically rerouted to a portal with bits and pieces from here and there. I don't want to be force fed anything. I want to decide for myself what to look at. If someone feel they must force me to look at something anyway, why can't they instead send me to a page or a portal catering to my needs?

So what am I looking for? I'm busy. Work long days. In my spare time I want to watch tv, movie on demand, I want exhibitions of interest to me, sales, information on gadgets, concerts, restaurants, discussions, a car show, sports - whatever. But what is on offer? I don't know and I don't want to waste time browsing the web to find out. Scanning Time Out and other available portals to map what is on that could interest me is just not possible. And they all come up with very general information anyway, with a bit of gossip and news thrown in for good measure. Consequently I miss most of the good opportunities.

I would like to see a site which compiles this sort of information for me from all available sources, offering thumbnails with links to dates, times and places for things I would be likely to do. And it would need to do this for me in the city where I live or in the one I am travelling to. So, when someone in Manchester or wherever has checked their hotmail they should be allowed to be sent to a page that tells them what they could do after work and what is coming up in two weeks and would interest them and which they would need to get tickets for now because there are only 50 left. There would still be room for some general gossip and news in a small section if the editor thinks this is a must. Or there could be the option of being sent to a tailored page instead of the general bric-a-brac page. You should be allowed to choose versatility, the news angle or the catering to your individual needs option.

Why can't I have a portal like this? Technically it should be easy, based on what people click on or from their actively setting up a profile. Why haven't the MS or the Google people (the thing in Chrome is nowhere near) come up with something like this? They are monitoring my mouseclicks anyway.

iPhone iPhone on the wall ...

The equipment we use is so out of step with our needs for quick everyday problem solving. We have the internet and fantastic it-applications for everything, but to access them we are basically left with machines not much different from what they were like 30 years ago; PCs that need ages to boot and plastic keyboards to input information. A household appliance that can free us from this extremely frustrating and user hostile environment is ages overdue.

The strange thing is that Apple has sort of invented it already. It is called the iPhone. A small beauty which potential has not been fully hatched yet. Why do they hesitate?

All they need to do is give it a 20 inch touch screen to be set in or hung on a kitchen or living room wall - or anywhere - possibly integrated with an Apple TV and with good loudspeakers or interface to audio equipment.

All set up, if I want to speak to aunt Mary – or see her – I go over and press the phone symbol and then her icon. If I want to access my favourite recipies there is an icon for that. If I want to know who is the king of Jordan I may have to type it in Google or maybe say 'Google' and 'king of Jordan' to the screen. If I want to check something in The Times I press that icon and to scroll through my favourite music as nicely as only the iPhone can do it, buy it at the Apple store, listen to Spotify or Slingbox a TV show to my iPhone handset, it is all there.

The iPhone is good, but the dimensions are all wrong for practical home use and I believe an appliance like this would be a godsend to most people. No more waiting for the screen to lit up (it is always on) and no more buttons to hammer, only the occasional virtual on-screen touch.

There may be a huge office marked for this as well, but the first stop is definitely home durables.

Please do it.

Green Shoots July 2009

The US unemployment figures are soaring and Schwarzenegger and colleagues are struggling to balance their budgets. Does re-election of Obama require another stimulus package? Also the slump in the UK turns out to be much worse than expected and Germany and Sweden have severely strapped state finances and their banks are highly exposed to the east. China has been remarkably quiet for a long time.

 

Surprising that all the bad news don't affect stock markets more. Have they priced in this and that already? It could be that all these traders really are expert macroeconomists with privileged access to information on impending recovery. It could also be that they have just become immune to the massively negative flow of information, hunch down to let the next log pass and concentrate on the daily trade.

 

By contrast the recession is not much felt in Norway - yet. Interest rates have been cut and boost spending on holidays and high street goods. A new housing bubble is on its way. Swedes and Poles still swarm here to get jobs. Fiscal stimuli have already been applied generously which will give us more of the same. There is a lot of latitude in a big oil fund. Probably only pockets of unemployment, falling import prices and banks hoarding money saves us from inflation. Stawberries are as expensive as ever.

 

Of course this country should do its modest bit to get the international economy growing again, but subsidized housing? Hardly the sector with the highest imports contents. Banks should probably rather lend to businesses, but there they are as prudent as financiers elsewhere in the world.

 

So, for how long can this country maintain its own private comfort bubble?

 

Just a reminder: there is also a general election this year. 

Snout in the trough

Good governance seems to be a real scarce commodity these days and kleptocracy is probably not a phenomenon unique to Africa.

Halliburton, Iceland, politicians granting themselves exceptional pensions, purchases and sales of political favours.

History and newspapers are awash with examples, and the stories from the British Parliament show that given opportunity and lenient norms, anyone seems capable of doing it.

Incredible that the same politicians seem to believe that they are Gods gift to their country and should be allowed to stay on in office, despite abusing taxpayers' money.

Do we really want our elected representatives to become corrupted or come to regard politics as a safe lifetime job?

Did we really look for little Mugabes in the making when we elected our MPs?

If Gordon Brown really wants his constitutional reform to make a difference, he should propose a ten year limit to the time any politician can sit in Parliament.

This could set a good example for other countries as well. There is no reason to believe that politicians are any worse in the UK than elsewhere.

But it won't happen, will it?

A Fairy Tale - or all is well that ends well.

17th of May is over and so is the Eurovision Song Contest. Sunshine and douze points.

Spring almost done and summer in the offing.

All well?

 

Well, not quite. Demand for Norwegian products is falling sharply along with prospects for the oil price. We are an open economy and without our exports we will have only fish and potatoes for dinner.

 

The stock exchange is bullish nevertheless and share prices are again being inflated by the herd.

A few investors say however they are expecting another sharp downturn soon and have withdrawn from stocks altogether.

One says he will not invest in shares till banks are nationalized and firms' credit lines restored.

When will that be with collateral asset values still falling and a huge exposure to potential losses in Eastern Europe and elsewhere?

 

The government's crisis strategy for the pension fund is to hoard stocks because they are cheap right now. Right, as long as those firms don't go bust. But what else is there to buy? Well, why not real estate in London City, which is cheap as well - and more durable than paper. Billions from the same fund are also poured into employment creation. Will it help? Against what? At best it may give us good infrastructure for the future. It cannot possibly kickstart Norwegian industries in this global desert of recession. The rest of the world is already stopping buying our products and as we are only 4.7 million (well fed) people in this country, developing new national markets the Chinese way is no option. And do we really want to buy whale meat, oil drills and aluminium wheel rims from one another?

 

Much higher unemployment figures are unavoidable - but not before the general elections please.

 

Hope they save a tiny bit for my pension.

 

 

 

But Krugman was not dead

Behold! Paul Krugman is in circulation again. His NYT column is flowing over with comments from concerned followers suspecting he was fed into submission or food poisoned at the White House dinner party. Messages from Beijing tell he survived and is as critical of the Obama rescue packages as ever. Good to see him back. Good to see he is still bent on saving us from a "Japanese slump".

Oslo is sunny and until further our only worry here is whether it will last.

Springtime in Winter Wonderland

May is happening in Norway. Nature simply exploded when the snow went away. In the land of the Winter God winter lasts 5 months. Plants have very little time to grow, florish and set fruit before the next snowfall. They know how to use it.

In the meantime the economic crisis disappeared from front pages. Struggling papers found that swine flu was a better life saver than the economic crisis. It was set to kill millions of us. Unfortunately it seems to peter away all too soon. Flu and crisis gone, what is there left to secure the future of the press? Just Gordon Brown, car bombs and philosophers who don't like gays?

Is a bullish Wall Street and ditto housing market really a sign of recovery?
Or are US banks still heavily stressed, European banks still heavily exposed to losses in Eastern Europe and are the rotten loans still there?
Optimism is well and good but is there really reason to declare victory already?

Whatever, rotten loans and viruses seem to make pretty good compost for the spring flowers.

Aid euthanasia?

Good show by "Dead Aid" Dambisa Moyo in Oslo the other day.
Her cure may not be adequate but the aggression she is met with by the donor community proves she has got a point.
And counter arguments are less than adequate. If we agree that showering African leaders with aid money spawns corruption and relieve them of the onus of being accountable to their own people it does not help to argue for more aid to build well functioning states with accountable leaders. If there ever was a Catch 22....
And by the way, who are we? Why are African leaders not more active themselves in solving their problems? Why do the mzungu think they need to coerce the people on the Equator to do the right thing? What is the right thing anyway?
Aid is not Dead, but what about euthanasia?

Dollar traps and thaw

Snow has almost gone now and stockmarkets rally - in some places. But does this mean that the global economic outlook is also improving? Traders have always had a great capacity for turning gloomy depressison into exalted optimism (and back) in the course of minutes. Journalists are quick to follow suit. But mania does not mean that danger is over. Admittedly the pre-easter G20 did emit positive sounds but as Krugman suggests in "China's dollar trap", "... the crisis probably still has years to run".

 

Could it be that the Winter God's finger in all this is less significant than assumed and that the corellation between frost and recession is overstated?

This really needs to be discussed with this Italian scientist who established the link between camping trips and earthquakes.

 

 

Inferiority complex – or just superfluous?

Oil nation. Arctic nation. A friends of the poor nation. Lighthouse of peace and human rights.

Peace in the Middle East. Remember? On the White House lawn with Arafat and Rabin – first row.

Peace in Sri Lanka. Remember?

Peace in East Timor. Remember? – Or was that Australia?

Amundsen beat Scott. – Remember? And whaling. Worth 25% of the South Pole?

1% of GNI as aid – 500% tariff rate on their meat. Good deal.

Awkward handshakes with G20 leaders. Meeting Hilary.

Staying sovereign – yet implementing most EU directives.

The press reporting any small mention of us abroad.

An ambitious nation half the population of Los Angeles desperate to make a difference. To be seen.

The world is probably a better place with less than 5 million Norwegians.

Retreat of the winter god

It is thawing like mad. Seems to have had a good effect on G20. Brighter times in sight? Hopefully in people's minds. There is perhaps still a way to go till banks are viable again.
No quick fixes but this time even Krugman sees light at the end of the tunnel.
Sunny day too.

Slump in winter resorts?

Geilo is deserted pre Easter. Strange. Windy.

What fascinating times we live in

Gordon Brown, PM of the country on the brink of deflation trying to squeeze more fiscal stimulus out of reluctant G20 partners while his CB governor and Chancellor say the UK is so indebted it can't afford more of it. Oops, Gordon took the hint.

Paul Krugman saying the Geithner Toxic Assets Demolition Plan solves nothing at all. Just subsidies to those who don't need them. Summers disagreeing. For how long?

(Hempton has got his own touch on saving the world: Bronte Capital: Paul Krugman’s false logical step. Not so much disagreeing as making a nerdy point.)

Could the world economy collapse because the US Congress cannot bear even 6 months of government managed banks and because Merkel and Sarkozy think they have done enough? It was someone else's fault anyway wasn't it?

Hopefully this is just a reality show and we are back in real life soon.

Snow has started falling again. It is March and minus 5C out there.

More snow coming

March. Thought spring had come at last, but no. Snow is forecast.

Also the IMF has just come out with a new prognosis for the world economy saying that things are not getting better till rich countries get their financial systems in order. Rotten equities and loans need to be taken due care of and banks recapitalized. If we all do the right things in concert and abstain from protectionism there could be improvement by the end of 2010 they say.
They may be right, but in a political world the prospects for that are not bright.

So to lighten up my own day I finally got myself an Omnia - not the HD, but this one does almost everything you ask of it.

Got to go wax my skis now.

Spring is here - at least in London

Hardly more 'House for sale' signs to be seen than ususal. In these for England so trying times you would expect a veritable forest of them here in London SW. But people don't bother any more they say. So hard to sell it is better to wait it out. For how long though?

More upbeat in the US where AIG employees are still due to receive huge bonuses. Contractual obligations? The recession could become even deeper if they don't get the extra millions to spend. But on the other hand, does it really help increasing the consumption of bank account numbers in Jersey?

Daffodils are already out here. The theory may have to be seasonally adjusted.