The view is somewhat difficult this week, not because of the continued thrashing of world markets, or even because of the contradictory views of marketwatchers, but simply because summer languor has set in. You wouldn't actually believe it when you listen to the news, which is still full of job losses, disappearing companies and miscellaneous tales of woe, but most of my dealer friends have decided that summer's here and it's time to crack open a few tinnies and stop worrying about global meltdown. The fact that the skies over the city are blue and the temperature's rocketing probably has a lot to do with it.
When I did the daily commute I always felt in holiday mode as soon as the traffic jams into work eased off a bit. This week, the Howth Road has been an oasis of calm at eight o'clock in the morning - usually it's the fiercest time. (The fact that I am up at eight o'clock in the morning to notice these things gives lie to the notion that I lie in bed 'til midday. Clearly that is a winter option!) I guess commuters better make the most of it while they can because the Port Tunnel excavations have begun along Fairview and I can see standstill traffic being the hot topic of the autumn.
In fact, the jams may become so awful that people will have to buy the Nokia communicator to get any work done at all. As you know, I was a late convert to the mobile phone although I concede its benefits. I have not, however, succumbed to the Palm Pilot and I will never buy a Nokia communicator. Is this bad news for the company? Probably not, since the communicator is aimed at the sad sort of bloke who apparently needs to work on the train. But why would you want to check your e-mails and write a Word document (especially using that fiddly little keyboard) before going into work? If I were a company executive and thought that one of my employees was writing Word documents on the train I'd fire him on the spot.
As you can gather from my in depth advertisement knowledge, in the absence of anything more exciting than the US data last Friday showing that growth for the second quarter was even worse than expected, I've been watching TV.
Clearly, summertime TV is normally dross TV and this summer is no exception, but one of British channels has been showing the brilliant Back to the Floor series. I'm not sure whether this is a re-run or a new series because the episodes I've seen are new to me but they're totally absorbing.
For those of you who haven't seen it, the general gist is that a hapless chief executive is dumped back at the entry grade of whatever company he or she happens to be heading and told to get on with it.
It's a little like all those documentaries where the wife and mother disappears for a couple of days and lets the husband look after the kids. He's gung-ho at first, reckoning it's all a doddle and delighted at the opportunity to prove it by planning a whole new way of implementing domestic procedures, only to be reduced to a snivelling wreck by the end of the first day. (I know that John Waters will tell me that I am stereotyping here but it's summer and I feel like it.)
Anyway, I've watched the progress of a variety of chief executives doing the jobs they pay others to do with great interest. Clearly nobody expects them to be skilled at the basics (just as well; Jacqueline Gold, the chief of the Ann Summers chain, destroyed yards of fabric in her efforts to manufacture a fairly ordinary bra, but their lack of understanding of how their companies operated at shopfloor level was astonishing.
I didn't expect any of them to be any good at sewing bras, sticking handles on china cups or being a decent waiter, but I'd have thought they'd have had a better idea of how other people got those things done. Most of them obviously thought that the programme would be good publicity for their companies and it probably was.
But I think that many chief executives were genuinely surprised to learn how little some of their junior staff earned and were made very uncomfortable at seeing the labour cost statistic suddenly translated into flesh and blood people with ideas of their own. In some cases, management blamed workers for lack of productivity only to find that the reasons for the fall-off were rooted in changes in work practices that the same management had instigated and that were subsequently changed again. Anyway, it's a truly enlightening series and, regardless of whether you're ground floor or top floor material, it's compulsive TV.
I know I'm not actually supposed to be doing a TV review column but the whole Jeffrey Archer thing was compulsive viewing too. So I was a little surprised to see that there wasn't more space given to the Archer Junior story. In fact, even back in February 1999 there was very little coverage of his suspension from CSFB's equity arbitrage team on suspected market manipulation.
Maybe he just doesn't have the appeal of his Dad. Last week James - a member of the team that styled itself the Flaming Ferraris - was banned for life from trading in the City, having been found guilty of carrying out forbidden trades and lying to cover it up, thus depriving the Archers of another source of income.
Meantime, the book trade has been trying to decide whether or not Jeffrey's latest headline hitting behaviour will boost his sales or not. They've certainly helped shift some of his biography which, in these sultry summer times, helps keep revenue for one area of the economy ticking over.
Ticking is all that's happening right now, even though the US Treasury Secretary, Paul O'Neill, is confident. I'm a little worried that some people in the market are heartened by those low GDP numbers in the States - their rationale is that weak growth should mean no inflationary pressures so the Fed can happily cut rates again and stave off recession. I'm beginning to wonder if the Treasury Secretary and some of his colleagues mightn't need to go back to the floor too if that's the way they're thinking!
