Morts Musings

Firstly, and most importantly, if you wish to make a donation to help the survivors of this terrible disaster, be careful which organisations you donate through; there have already been reports of fake web sites being set up by contemptably sick b*stards who are trying to profit from the earthquake. Well known charities, like Oxfam, have their own Haiti Earthquake pages and are probably the safest route for those who wish to help by giving an online donation.

I first caught news of the Haiti Earthquake late on Tuesday night while catching some headlines on the BBC before going to bed. Even at those early stages it seemed clear that the damage caused by it, and it’s aftershocks, was going to be immense, but over the last couple of days, as more and more news has filtered out of the impoverished Caribbean nation, the true scale of the devastation has started to become clear. It beggars belief.

The quake itself measured 7.0 on the Richter Scale, and as such is classified as a “Major” earthquake, while even the aftershocks measured 5.5. and 5.9 on the scale, making them significant earthquakes in their own right. To put things a little more in perspective, a magnitude 7 earthquake is the equivalent of a 32 megaton nuke, 1000 times more powerful than the Nagasaki atomic bomb. In addition, the quake was relatively shallow occurring only 10km below the surface. Shallow quakes are less likely to trigger tsunamis, but also tend to cause more damage in their immediate area, as we’re seeing in Haiti at the moment.
Even in a developed nation, with well constructed structures, a magnitude 7 earthquake would be a serious event, but in a nation like Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, the level of destruction is almost unimaginable! That the quake’s epicentre was only 15km from the densely populated capital, Port-au-Prince, has only exacerbated the situation.
Many of the city’s buildings were poorly constructed leaving them especially vulnerable to the quake, and it appears that many of those killed or injured were indoors at the time of the quake, or close to buildings which collapsed. Even so the death toll is staggering. So far it’s reckoned that 50,000 have died although there are fears that this could rise to as much as 500,000. Half a million people, it’s a simply stunning figure!

In many ways though the quake was only the beginning of the disaster, and looking after the survivors is now the main priority. Many Haitians live on less than a dollar a day, & even in normal times the country is heavily reliant on foreign food aid, but providing clean water, food & shelter for the thousands of, now homeless, survivors is going to be a huge task. Also, with so many dead to recover from the rubble, there’s a massive risk of disease.
Offers of aid and support have been flooding in pretty much since the quake struck, but even so, given the Herculean scale of the task, more help is needed. Most major charities have started appeals, for example Oxfam’s Haiti Earthquake donation page.

The news from Dubai World, last Wedsnesday, that they were seeking to delay the repayments on £36bn worth of loans, has raised anxieties both in the Middle East’s financial markets and around the world. Many investors had assumed that, because the investment company was run by the Dubai Govt, any debts which Dubai World accrued would be secured. However todays announcement by the Dubai Finance Minister made the position, that the Dubai Govt wouldn’t be guaranteeing these debts, absolutely clear.

To try and stem the fears of a new global financial crisis becoming a reality, the UAE’s central bank has announced the implementation of a fund to provide extra liquidity to both UAE based banks, & foreign banks which operate in the country; a move which appears to have calmed the fears of the financial markets somewhat, at least based on the performance of the Asian markets today.

Closer to home Dubai’s financial woes are cause for concern for a number of UK banks, including HSBC, RBS, Barclays & Lloyds, who viewed the Emirate as a safe financial bet & invested heavily; RBS is the biggest underwriter of Dubai Worlds’ loans, so nervous times in Gogarburn no doubt. Whether they’ll be covered by the UAE Central Bank’s bail out fund, and if so, to what extent, is unclear at the moment, but these must be worrying times for a few big wigs in the British financial sector. (Unless, of course, they’re expecting that they’ll just get bailed out by the British tax payer, again.)

Flight from Dubai?

Still, in the longer term, the decision by the Dubai Govt not to back Dubai World’s debts may come back to haunt them. Although they insist that the company has always been a seperate entity, many investors assumed that, because it’s state run, it would be bailed out by Govt if there were any problems. Many investors may feel that they’ve been mislead, and, if so, it could make it significantly more difficult for Dubai to attract investors in future; at the very least future investors will want to know exactly what terms they’re lending on.

Well, the above was written yesterday, but it seems the story has moved on overnight, so no need to cancel your flights to Dubai just yet!
Dubai world is now in talks with its creditors and is seeking to restructure just £26bn of its total (£59bn) liabilities. Although that still sounds like a huge sum to the average person, apparently the move has greatly calmed fears in the banking world. I guess it sends signals that the company isn’t on the verge of collapse, and with the economic system being so reliant on the confidence, it might be enough to prevent Dubai Worlds’ problems spreading & precipitating another dip in the world’s, still recovering, financial markets.

It was all over the news yesterday; President Obama has said he will attend the Copenhagen Climate Change summit next month, and the announcement has, not surprisingly, been hailed as a positive move by the media in general.

As always though the devil is well and truly in the details. We certainly need the US, along with China, to sign up to any deal that is reached for it to actually have any meaning; without the participation of the world’s two most polluting nations any climate change agreement that is reached is just so much hot air, as we saw with Kyoto.
As of yet China’s president, Hu Jintao, hasn’t made any committment one way or the other as to whether he’ll attend Copenhagen, so even with Obama’s attendance at this stage there are no guarentees that anything substantive or meaningful will come out of Copenhagen. Still, at least one of the big two polluters appears to be prepared to start taking action, undoubtedly a step forward in the battle to mitigate the impact of climate change before it’s too late.

Unfortunately, although Obama seems genuinely committed to taking action on the issue, how much he’ll be able to achieve is another question entirely. Generally Americans are far less concerned about the threat of climate change than he is. Currently the US has a Climate Bill in front of Congress, which aims for a 20% reduction in US CO₂ emissions by 2020. However it’s taking 2005 as it’s base level, whereas Europe and many other countrys are setting their reduction targets based on 1990 emisson levels. Even then it’s looking like Obama’s going to have to reduce his preposed target from 20% in order to get the necessary support to pass the bill through Congress; hence why he’ll only be pledging a 17% cut, by 2020, when he attends Copenhagen.
It also has to be noted that currently he’s only planning to attend the summit for one day, before heading off to Oslo to accept his Nobel Prize, and won’t be returning to Copenhagen for the crucial final days of the summit, when any agreement will be hammered out.

Overall it has to be seen as a positive step, that a US President is finally engaging in the fight to tackle the effects of Climate Change, but it also has to be remembered that he ultimately serves his electorate, and so, even if Obama is on-board with the struggle to reduce the effects of climate change it’s quite clear that his hands will, to an extent, be tied until he’s able to convince more of the US population that climate change is everybody’s problem!

Apparently, the iconic British brand, M&S, has opened a branch in Marbella. Presumably the aim is to be able to provide British ex-pats, & tourists, with all their familiar home comforts, & on the face of it that might not be such a bad basis for opening a store. After all Brits make up about a quarter of all foreign tourists to visit Spain.

However, I really have to wonder about the timing of the move. Ok, it looks like the economic slump may be coming to an end but even so it seems to me like quite a risky move. In the fairness M&S have said that opening the store is a “toe in the water”, to test the Spanish market, but is now really the time for such experiments? On one hand, the recent low prices in the Spanish property market have to be a good reason to make such a move now, you would think it’s certainly got to decrease the start up costs, and if Spanish property does start regaining its value, as some are suggesting is the case, then picking a store up now may even be a shrewd investment!
Still, if M&S’s target audience for the new store is Brits abroad, (it seems like a fair guess) then the timing starts to look a little more questionable to me. Britain’s slow recovery from recession means that many Brits are still going to be watching the pennies and avoiding foreign holidays, a factor likely to be exacerbated by the current poor Pound:Euro exchange rate, & reflected by the 15% drop in British visitors which Spain has experienced over the past year. What makes the move stranger is that this isn’t the first time that M&S have opened stores in Spain, the previous venture ended in the sale of the nine stores when they failed to make a profit. Still, the thinkers at M&S have no doubt considered all of this, and are presumably willing to accept a loss in the short term.

I suppose a big question is whether they’ll extend their recent move to stock non-M&S branded goods to the new store? Are we to be treated to M&S Marbella car hire? lol

I saw this piece in the Telegraph and thought it was such an innovative idea that it deserved a mention. It’s clear as the internet, and general tech, revolution continues that mobile phones are set to play an increasingly important part in peoples lives. The net is alive with talk about increased mobile access, and it seems these days that most big companies & organisations either have a mobile site or are furiously trying to get one up and running, lest they loose out to more forward thinking competitors.

''Press 2 if the dog ate your homework...'' Yes, now mobile phones can even provide pay-as-you-go English lessons!

However the move to offer English lessons, via mobile phone, to a whole nation has to get cudos for its originality & ambition, and it’s just what the Bangladeshi organisation BBC Janala aims to do. By getting the Bangladeshi Govt on board, as well as the country’s six major mobile networks, BBC Janala has been able to offer hundreds of 3 minute English lessons for only 4p each; Very cheap you might think, and probably not too expensive even by Bangladeshi standards, although one must bear in mind that the average Bangladeshi has to live on less than £2 a day.

The initiative is particularly significant because, while English remains a major international language of business, over the last few decades the quality of English teaching in the country has dropped noticably, which, along with the school systems high drop out rate, has lead to lower English fluency overall.
It would certainly appear that the service is being well received so far; it’s about two weeks since it launched and already it’s had over half a million calls, as well as ~1000 people signing up to the web site each day! So far things seem to be running smoothly, the only potential problem with the scheme that I can think of is people with pay as you go phones running out of credit half way through a lesson!