1 Good news grand slam (Stephanie Flanders on BBC) There
have now been four pieces of good economic news in as many days: inflation,
employment, retail sales and now the public finances have all come in better
than expected. The EU Summit even ended in (partial) agreement. No-one's
cracking out the champagne, but it's fair to say that the economic picture
looks brighter than it has been for a while.
The September borrowing figures will be especially
welcome to the British chancellor. Thanks to some encouraging growth in
revenues, these show the lowest September deficit since 2008. The Office for
National Statistics has also revised down borrowing for the first five months
of 2012-13 by a chunky £6.7bn, largely because spending by central government
turns out to have been lower than initially thought.
2 Moody’s warns of German banking weakness (The New
York Times) The debt ratings agency Moody’s Investors Service provided a
reminder Friday that the vaunted German economy has a major weakness: its
banking system. In a report, Moody’s warned that German banks suffer from
meager profits, rising risk and insufficient reserves to absorb losses. The rating
agency reaffirmed the negative outlook it has assigned to German banks since
2008.
The poor state of German banks seems surprising
considering that the country’s economy has held up fairly well to the euro zone
crisis. In addition, German banks benefit from the country’s status as a haven
from the turmoil and are able to borrow money at much lower rates than
counterparts in other European countries. There is no real estate bubble and
households are not over-indebted.
German banks did, however, invest heavily in
countries like Spain and Italy before the crisis, because they could earn more
profits there than at home. Four years after the financial crisis began, they
remain exposed to problems in those countries, Moody’s said. In addition,
Moody’s said, Germany still has too many banks in relation to the size of the
country. The oversupply pushes down lending rates and profits. “Intense
competition and low interest rates are causing margin pressure that will likely
further erode already-weak bank revenues and profits,” Moody’s said in a
statement early Friday.
3 Am I a ‘working dad’? (Ken Gordon in The New York
Times) I’m a dad — two children, 9 and 7 — and I work. Hard. I fall out of bed
at about 5 am and stumble back there at about 10 pm, and it seems like I
haven’t caught my breath or cleared my to-do lists since my first child was
born on July 22, 2002. Yet in spite of all this unremitting labor, no one, not
a single person, has ever called me a “working dad.” I’ve never called myself
this. The question on the docket is, “Why not?”
For one, “Working dad” is a weird term. An odd idea.
Working dads simply don’t count as a recognized demographic in our society — a
dad is a dad, and he works, of course, and to suggest otherwise is, well,
strange. A working mom, after all, is a term of approval. She is a master of
multitasking. A mistress of multitasking. The whole
bring-home-the-bacon-and-fry-it-up-in-a-pan shtick commands our respect and
admiration. The adjective “working” means that whatever else she’s doing, she’s
also on the job.
My fellow dads and I deserve the same kind of
respect, no? We dudes get up every day and make breakfast. We feed the cat,
take out the trash, wash the dishes, if any are left over from the night
before. We can do an occasional emergency load of laundry — even if we
sometimes mix lights and darks — drop the kids off, and commute to work. And
then put in a full workingman’s day of labor. After which we rush home, bolt
down dinner and shuttle our kids to soccer, guitar lessons and the rest. Then
it’s overseeing homework, playing with the kids, helping them into jammies, and
finally a good-night story or two. At the end of all this, we do maybe an hour
of work and then collapse next to our wives. That’s enough to earn a “working
dad” merit badge, no?
If not, I have another, more modest proposal. I
suggest that we give “working,” that poor, exhausted adjective, a vacation.
Perhaps we can replace it with one that fits contemporary moms — and dads — better.
What about “overworked”? This adjective suggests that every good contemporary
parent is employed on many levels, and that all our nonstop busy-ness, means
that we’re chronically wiped out. Works for me.
3 Paperless news (Khaleej Times) It’s been a rapid
and painful death for print in the West during the past decade. It started when
newspapers started collapsing — one after another began losing advertisers,
market revenue and readers in the Internet age. In fact, with 105 newspapers
shuttered and 10,000 newspaper jobs lost in the US in 2009, the Business
Insider declared the latter the “year the newspaper died”. Amidst plummeting
stock market value of newspapers, owners of Los Angeles Times and Wall Street
Journal chose to sell off the majority of the their holding. The renowned New
York Times Company has been witnessing a major decline in its stock since 2004.
Other print
houses on the brink of a financial crisis, were quick to see the writing on the
wall and thus switched their operations online.
Amongst the hundreds that did, Christian Science Monitor is a recognised
name worldwide; the paper shut down its print edition in 2008. Now it seems
like even magazines are not insulated from financial woes of the print industry.
It’s none other than Newsweek that will be shutting down its print edition
after 80 years. The magazine’s editor-in-chief Tina Brown has signified that
this move aims to “embrace the all-digital future”. 
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