The Ratings Scam

The U.S. rating agency Standard and Poor’s has become a something of a joke in Austria. What? They downgraded us? While still awarding a AAA to the United Kingdom?
Since the London riots, every Austrian knows that unemployment in the U.K. is high – in fact 8.6%, whereas here it still hovers around 4%, the lowest in the EU. Our public debt, while too high at 70% of GDP, is far below the eurozone average of 86% and far below the U.K. at 148%, both figures counting financial interventions. All in all, it’s just not funny!
The reasons given were: 1) inflexible government institutions, and 2) exposure to the failing Hungarian economy. Could be they simply don’t seem to know what they’re talking about.
Take flexibility: Austria has many shock absorbers that kick in in hard times – reductions in overtime, further training, and shorter working hours instead of layoffs, steadying consumption until the economy picks up. Then there’s the social partnership – still alive and well – that brings government, business, labour and academia to the table to work out policy that takes all interests into account. It’s not a formal government body, but it works.
And while Hungary is reeling, it’s only a small part of the picture; the rest of the CEE is holding its own, in part through the “Vienna Initiative” of Western and Eastern European bank managers, the IMF and the EBRD, who lobbied the private sector to stay involved in the CEE, preventing panic selling.
All in all, Austria seems to be doing fine. Economist Marcus Scheiblecker of the Austrian Institute for Economic Research (WIFO) expects the Austrian economy to post a very respectable growth rate of 3% for 2011, as Germany is Austria’s largest trading partner and the weak economies of Europe play only a small role.
Fortunately Austrians aren’t paying much attention. In a survey by Marktagent.com, published 19 Jan., 78% of Austrians doubt the competence of the ratings agencies, citing their failure to recognise the build-up to the 2008 financial crisis.
They may be on to something. The stock markets barely quivered in response to the news. As Jeffrey Kleintop, chief market strategist at LPL Financial told The New York Times, “downgrades by rating agencies are really a lagging indicator. The analysts are reacting to the same news and information that the rest of the market has already seen.”
Adjustments have already been made – as we have made ours about Standard & Poor’s.

The Next Big Thing

Look around! Women leaders are everywhere: German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Christine Lagarde of the International Monetary Fund, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. Then our three Nobel Peace laureates: Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and activists Leymah Gbowee, also of Liberia, and Tawakkol Karman of Yemen.

It’s hard not to be inspired!

Until you start thinking about it. We’ve seen patterns like this before … Too many skirts, and the trousers take a walk! Prestige and influence (and salaries!) fall. It’s happened to pharmacists and psychotherapists-, in publishing, real estate and public relations.

But heads of state? Since when have men given up power so easily? There must be a loophole! (Sound of cog wheels turning...)

That’s it! The men don’t want these jobs any more! Think about it: Who wants to be head of state when the societies are a mass of tensions and the economies on the edge of collapse?

You can just hear the bravado at the bar: “Yes sir! What a time we had!” A joy ride of high stakes and conquest, gunning the motor into overdrive and heading for the horizon. So what if they skipped the occasional service check – that’s just a con job for mechanics, anyway – while they ripped off the pressure gauges and ran the wondrous old post-war economy straight into the ground.

“No problem,” you can hear the men congratulating each other, arm over shoulder and glass in hand. “The girls will clean up the mess.” Anyway, they’ve got to get on to the Next Big Thing.

The trouble is, it’s getting harder to figure out just what that could possibly be.

Originalky published in the Vienna Review 27/10/2011

On Technology and the Writing Life.

At work on a story the other weekend and feeling trapped inside my four walls (as well as my head), I packed up my laptop, stuffed a couple of books in my backpack and headed out for Café Sperl. Perhaps the change of locus would snap me out of my stupor. Sperl is a great place to work: It’s quiet (no canned music) and commodious, with a pleasant staff, just attentive enough without getting in the way.
It was still early, not quite 11:00 on a Saturday morning, and to my delight, the protected corner table in the elbow formed by the glassed-in foyer was free.
I moved in, spreading out on the upholstered banquette, plush and pleasingly worn, that soaks up whatever sound hasn’t already drifted up past the brass chandeliers to the ceiling six metres above. I scanned the menu; the food here is unusually good for a café and the coffee excellent.
It also has free WiFi.
Writing in 1959, Friedrich Torberg, the great chronicler of the Viennese Kaffeehaus of the inter war years, mourned the passing of the literary cafés in the city that was again his home. Why had writers abandoned them, he wondered? Was the coffeehouse responsible?
“The fault,” he decided, “lies with technology, that has formed an eerie three-leafed alliance with politics and sociology. It’s because today’s writers write literature directly into their typewriters – which one cannot take along to the coffeehouse [too heavy and too noisy]; that they dictate their radio scripts to a secretary, whom one also cannot take along to the coffeehouse either (at least not for dictation)”; that producers, directors and editors all want to be visited in their offices. And, he pointed out, “they all have a telephone at home as well as the office, so don’t need to receive free calls in the Kaffeehaus. “
How times have changed. Today, my “typewriter” is a MacBook Pro, powerful and silent, that connects me instantly with staff and stringers, as well as the magic library of the Internet. My telephone is in my pocket, waiting for words spoken, or texted when I don’t feel like talking.
For anyone who writes for a living, a Kaffeehaus is again the perfect retreat, where you can disappear for hours, eat and drink as much or as little as keeps one’s brain in gear and have the pleasure of human companionship that leaves you blissfully in peace. And get a lot of work done.
So, Herr Torberg, be comforted: Rather than signing the doom of the Kaffeehaus, technology may just have given it back its raison d’être.