Monday 17 April 2000

Pic of the day: OK, so this is not Alan Greenspan, not by a far shot. On the bright side, this guy in the picture is not around to gripe about me having fun with his pic. Can you imagine how hard it is to come up with some kind of illustration for an abstract (and rambling) entry like this?

I overslept and got to work late. I hurried to log on the Internet and get the economy comments. Yes! There it was! The stock market keeps sliding, and it starts to get headlines. A couple more days like this and it should hog the front of the tabloids. Yay! Glory to God and to his servant Alan Greenspan! Ahem. Actually I'm not sure if Greenspan is a theist at all; I don't know him personally, I'm sorry to say. Rumor has it that he, too, is very arrogant. If so, he certainly has reason for it, having saved the world economy time and again.

Oslo Stock Exchange fell like a cow from an airplane in the first few minutes after opening. But then the parachute opened, and then the big party balloons, as people rushed in to mop up the "cheap" shares. The index started to float upwards and landed a rather moderate 2.4% down. To further buoy the market, the New York Stock Exchange had opened up before our closing time.

But I am not disheartened. I know that it was not the investors who swooped in this time to grab the falling shares. It's still the gamblers who are active. Some of them also happen to be serious investors who simply don't have much else to do in a bubble market than make the best out of it. Others are pure thrill-seekers with a sense for the market psychology. Newspapers have promoted postal workers who have become multimillonaires on the stock market. They may go postal again when this bubble is over, unless they withdraw in time. (Insert standard joke here.)

The gradual descent of the world's leading stock exchanges is a beautiful sight to behold for those of us who believe that the laws of economics are like the laws of nature, rather than like the capricious laws of men. But it has a more immediate importance here in Norway. We are nearing the time where the main labor unions and the employer's union make a final deal about the wages and salaries. The Norwegian economy is strongly tied to oil exports - too strongly perhaps - and with the recent record oil revenues, workers are expecting fairy tales to come true and money to rain down from on high. Nothing would be better than tabloids screaming: "Stock panic! Economy crashes!"

Now wait a minute. I'm not exactly a capitalist myself, so why don't I side with the workers? Well, I do. I do, I do, I do! It goes like this. Shares go up and down (as recent events show) but wages only go one way, namely up. In theory you could try wage cuts, but chances are this will fail horribly unless the initiative comes from the workers. (This happened once, I have heard.) Faced with wage cuts, workers will be very dispirited even in the cases where they don't outright strike the company into the grave, as is the default reaction. So even if it survives, the company will suffer a severe blow to productivity. And in a country where labor unions still have quite a bit of power (that's Norway, I'm afraid) you can simply forget it, as the larger unions won't allow local cells to destroy the solidarity by caving in to lower pay.

So the correction to a wage spike is not a wage dip, but unemployment. And it has prettty big negative effects on society, not to mention on the guys who stand there without work. (Yes, it's mainly guys, since they have lower education than the women.) Anyway, it's better to retain the current standards of living - among the highest in the world on average - than to gamble it all by raising the stakes in a wage conflict just as the economy is poised for a downturn.

A downturn which can still be reduced to a small dip rather than a crash, if people can contain their greed just a little bit longer. (And that goes for the CEO too, please. If you don't guess that grabbing another million from the company's cash register will upset your workers, you are stupid to the point of incompetence.)

OK, enough about that. Or if you just can't get enough of sensible economic thought, visit The Economist, the global, impartial resource on economics, politics and science. Written by and for intelligent people for generations, now available on the Net. Read, learn, grow.

Me, as I said, I overslept this day and came way late to work. So I stayed longer and was not home till 19 (7PM). Even so, I did not get nearly all the stuff done that I had hoped. It's not like my workplace is really important, but once it is there it better function properly. That means I have to actually work, occasionally. These days are one such occasion. And it's only two workdays left before Easter. I hope I don't get sick!

I do feel a bit queasy right now, but hopefully it's just from too much snacks at the end of the workday. Or the two bananas I have eaten over the last four days, ca one half each day. Fruit always upsets my digestion. You'd think that if we were so closely related to the monkeys, fruit should be ideal. Well, obviously I am less related to the monkeys than most. (Despite being somewhat hairy all over. You know what, spinsters, if you married me you would not need a cat. But if you prefer your pussies, that's fine by me. Your loss.)