John Linton .......though didn't that already reach its own catastrophic end in the USSR and the PRC et alia some twenty years ago? But now some commentators are suggesting that the 'West' is going to swap political ideologies with the communists and regulate the world to another form of collapse. The thought of Krudd running a bank is terrifying - ignoring his inevitable desire to use it as an additional source of pork barrelling now he's p***ed the budget surplus away.
I don't know if too many people remember the catchily captioned "tech wreck" of the first years of this millennium but it was the end of the first dot com hyper investment bubble followed by a wipe out of a lot of people's money in stupid gambling that every new huckster's dream of being the next Google was only a few mill of gullible investor's money away. It was largely confined to the USA in terms of major money losses but even in Australia it had its minor echo with, among other more obvious examples, even James Packer and Lachlan Murdoch losing many hundreds of millions of their respective father's money in madness gone insane called One.Tel. Of course there were many others but I don't remember them now.
At that time even unbelievably rock solid companies like IBM had their shares trashed in the general 'tarring with the same brush' approach investors/gamblers had to getting rid of shares listed on the NASDAQ and all sorts of probably viable tech start up companies were halted in their promising tracks with most disappearing before the retail stores started their Christmas promotions in 2002 - a horrible two year period for the more innovative part of the overall business economies of many countries that has reduced investment in really good ideas right up until today and will still have a negative influence for years to come.
If you weren't involved in the 'tech' industries at that time then you probably weren't affected and therefore have no experience of what happens when a particular industry that was a boom employer for ten or so years suddenly lost 80% of its size in less than a year. I hadn't thought about that time for a while until I read this article today:
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/03/06/the-financial-wreck-surpasses-the-tech-wreck/?mod=rss_WSJBlog?mod=
I have never really been able to get my head around what a "trillion" of anything really means but I'm pretty comfortable with percentages and wiping out 83% of the value of the financial companies in the USA puts in very clear perspective the depth of the problems the world now faces. I remember that really brilliant sysadmins and programmers couldn't find another job in 2001/2002 (despite being right at the top of their skill set) and having to take all sorts of non-skilled jobs just to keep food on the table (their nice apartments and houses disappeared along with their jobs as did their wives and girl friends in more than a few instances). Some of those really brilliant people were so scarred by their experiences of being, effectively, destitute that they never came back to the industry at all. One person I knew chose to end his life.
I don't know whether the people who have lost their jobs from the various financial institutions around the world over the past 12 months or so are any better placed to continue with their lives than the tech firees of 7-8 years ago and I wouldn't be able to hazard a guess but, unlike the 'tech wreck', the current financial sector melt down has brought down almost every other industry sector with it and unlike the 'tech wreck' this has caused significant job loss outside their industry sector and is likely to cause more. This of course makes finding another job, of any sort, even more difficult with, as far as I have read, only Australia's leading supermarket saying it will employ more staff over the coming months (an 'ex-master of the universe' as a check out chick? - doesn't seem likely).
I still see no signs of Exetel's very small business being affected by the financial difficulties currently being experienced with new orders in the first week of March continuing the upward trend sustained through January and February in the majority of our ten service offerings. I have been looking in detail for any sign of weakening in our tiny part of the industry but, at least so far, I don't see anything - though perhaps this is a sign of what is to come:
http://www.smh.com.au/national/greed-is-a-spent-force-say-researchers-20090308-8sh3.html
Maybe people in Australia will, now its probably too late, become more sensible about how much they spend and what they spend it on? If that actually happens then the amount of money spent on communications will inevitably shrink and that is not going to do anything positive for the industry generally. Perhaps 'low cost' providers are being 'sheltered' from the first signs of a down turn in communications which is why I still can't detect anything indicating a slow down?
Of course our very small size protects us from 'major trends' as we don't have the volumes to make trends immediately discernible and we are still so small we react to any slight change immediately which again tends to blur 'early warning' signs of trends. About the only signs of trends we see is the largely down beat half year reporting of the large publicly listed companies and, in the communications sector, the almost deathly silence in "new initiatives and success" announcements from the usual industry loudmouths.
Perhaps this is the period in Australia of the 'phoney financial crisis' with the equivalent of the 'blitz' (major company collapses)and the 'invasion of Denmark and Norway' (haphazard government nationalisation) about to blast all of us out of our complacency?
Now, where did I put that gas mask?