Vittachi

What financial jargon really means

This financial prediction is guaranteed to be on target

By Nury Vittachi

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Like many people, I have watched the world’s stock markets bounce up and down over the past few months. But unlike the rest of you I KNOW WHY.

                The answer was given to me by a financial analyst, a person who can best be described as “a man who carries a printout of a wobbly line”. He pointed to it. “You’ll notice that every few years, there’s a wobbly bit. Well, we’ve hit another wobbly bit.” (He gets paid the GDP of a small country for saying things like this.)

I showed him a prediction in the newspaper about Asian financial markets over the summer: “While we may see the markets advance, further corrections remain a real risk, as does the possibility of the indexes being trapped in a narrow trading range.”

                Hmm. “Advance” means climbs up, “correction” means falls down, and “narrow trading range” means stuck at one level. In other words, he is saying it may go up, it may go down, or it may stay the same.

                In OTHER other words, it is really saying, “I don’t have the foggiest idea what’s going on.”

Does this mean brokers are stupid? No, it means they are very clever. It means I am stupid because I nod admiringly while they are telling me they have no idea what is going on.

In one newspaper recently, an investment banker said: “The markets may recover, or it may be the end of the world.” That’s what is called “hedging bets”. He gets paid the GDP of a medium-sized country for saying things like that.

But I did learn one useful thing. Financial people are often highly creative individuals (I use the phrase in the journalistic sense of “crooks”). The many guides to new financial terminology on the market get thicker every year, as indeed, do sad people like me who attempt to read them.

But these books only tell you what financial people say – they don’t tell you what they mean. So here’s a guide to what bits of financial jargon actually mean.

Short-term buy: Probably a bad investment.

Medium-term buy: Definitely a bad investment.

Long-term buy: Definitely a really, really bad investment.

Ultra-long term buy: Guaranteed to make no money at all for at least seven generations or until the sun implodes, whichever takes longer.

Standard and Poor: A description of the typical investor.

Market Crash: A major price adjustment that the financial community arranges to happen the day after you put your savings into shares.

Cash Flow: Movement of money, which always happens in one direction: away from you and towards the brokers.

Institutional Investor: People who lose money in such vast quantities that they should really be locked up in institutions.

Bull Market: A normal part of the cycle which causes financial professionals to mistake themselves for geniuses.

                Correction: God having the last laugh on the people in the item above.

                Some people have found a way to guarantee they will not lose money in the financial markets. This cunning scheme is called “Not Having Any in the First Place” and is widely used by teachers, journalists, social workers, nurses, priests and so on.

                My financial analyst friend has more money than I do—but it comes with a new wobbly line chart. It’s his stress level, and I wouldn’t have it for all the tea in my grandmother.

Marketing to the terminally stupid 2

How to sell locust beans and seaweed to kids
By Nury Vittachi

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My wife bought a box of “Fruit By The Foot” strawberry snacks. From the package, one might assume it would contain foot-long (30 cm) snacks made of strawberries.
               Wrong. It turned out to contains strips of dyed sugar. Nothing remotely strawberryish was listed on the list of ingredients. However, it did contain locust beans and seaweed.

                I imagine that the manufacturer, Betty Crocker, must have come up with the product and then test-marketed it: “Hey, kids, wanna try a yummy locust bean and seaweed snack?”

                Getting the thumbs down, they used classic business strategy known as Call It Something Else and came up with “strawberry”.

                I asked a nutritionist friend how food companies could get away with this sort of thing. She pointed out that Betty Crocker was American and thus more heavily regulated than Asian food firms.

                Until now. This year, most Asian states are making laws about what labels can and cannot say.

                Not before time. Some Asian products have labels which are just plain baffling, as my diaries show:

               Seen on a Japanese carton of diary products: “Boy cow milk.”

               Seen on a pack of Chinese aubergines: “Violent Eggplants”.

               Seen on a Hong Kong pack of chilled chicken: “Four-Legged Chicken.”

               Law drafters in Asia are focusing on packaging that makes specific health claims.

   One package of Japanese coffee has this on the label: “Black coffee has great features which other coffees have never had: Non-sugar.”

                A bottle of health tonic from mainland China has this claim: “Known to cure itching, colds, stomachs, brains, and other diseases.”

                From India, a reader showed me a packet of Holy Miracle Cow Dung. Which just goes to show that food company claims are sometimes quite literally a load of bull.

                While researching this topic, I noticed that many food makers use the classic business technique known as Marketing to the Terminally Stupid.

                For example, most chocolate products boast about how much cocoa they have. But Nutella, a chocolate hazelnut spread, has a big tick on the label next to the words “Only 7.6 per cent cocoa.”

                Buy a can of Coke and you find the calorie count per serving in a neat little table on the side. But only when you read the small print do you see that each can is said to contain “1.88 servings”. This would make sense if the average customer bought a can, poured out just under half of it into his glass, and then poured the rest of the can into a separate glass for someone else, and then rushed back to the shop to get another can to fill up the second glass.

                Dear Coca-Cola Company, I don’t do this. Does that make me weird?

                (Don’t answer that.)

                The nutritionist told me candy bars were always made with an odd number of chunks, to prevent parents sharing one between two kids. I checked in my local shop. It was true: every chocolate bar had five chunks.

                Anyway, among the new food labeling laws in Asia are one which requires all perishable items (with the exception of members of the Chinese politburo) to be clearly stamped with a “Sell By” date.

                Some have already started. However, I’m not sure that Asian food manufacturers really “get it”. On my shelf I have a bottle of Chinese medicine which says:

               “Expiration Date: 2 years.”

                Er, from when?

Newspapers are actually growing

By Nury Vittachi

Newspapers are thriving, but don’t tell anyone

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As I peruse yet another magazine article celebrating the arrival of the digital age and mourning the loss of the old-fashioned print media, an important thought strikes me: I wonder what’s for dinner?

Reading such articles make my mind wander to more earth-shaking subjects such as my dinner for several reasons. First, because they are so many of them; second, because they are all wrong; and third, because I am on a diet (I have to get in shape for an appointment with my tailor).

You wouldn’t believe how widespread the digital fallacy is. When I tell people I write for newspapers, they shake their heads and talk sadly of “sunset industries”. Journalism.org says printed publications “are increasingly seen as anachronisms in this new media landscape”. Professors talk about the “terminal decline” of the traditional newspaper.

Anyway, I shall tell you a secret that is STRICTLY LIMITED to you, me, and other few hundred thousand people who read this column.

None of it is true. Newspaper circulations are up. Readership is up. Advertising is up. Revenue is up. The top Asian papers have been growing steadily for years and are hitting new records every year, including this one.

But this is hush-hush. We are not telling the Big Name International News Commentators about this. Why?

Because they think the world consists of three places (North America, Western Europe and Australia) and it suits us to let them continue to think this. In those three places, newspapers have fallen out of fashion.

But in Asia, the opposite is true. Almost all the world’s top papers are now in Asia (74 out of the top 100) and are growing. More papers are sold every day in tiny Japan than in the whole of the United States. Ninety-nine million papers are day are printed in India, and 107 million in China, both record highs.

Asians spend an unusually long time with their papers. The typical Chinese reader spends an average 48 minutes with each one, surveys show. Given that many readers spend just a few minutes glancing at the headlines while commuting, this means the others spend 20 hours with each paper, which would necessitate eating, bathing, and going to bed with them (I'm really touched by this. I didn’t know they cared).

                Why haven’t Asians abandoned newspapers for computers?

                Well, you can’t wrap your rice and curry lunch in a laptop, for a start. Well, actually, you probably could, but it would be pretty messy.

                Second, you can’t hang your computer on a nail in the toilet to wipe your bum with. Well, again, I suppose you could if you were desperate and insane.

                And third, the single most important thing a newspaper provides doesn’t work on a computer screen. I’m talking about those long, happy hours scribbling in the margins of a scrunched-up paper doing the crossword or Sudoku.

                Experienced newspapermen like me have no pretensions about what is really important to readers. If we misspell the President’s name or print “billion” instead of “million”, nobody notices.

But if we print the wrong crossword grid, thousands of people riot outside our offices, and the production editor has to commit ritual suicide in the nearest public stadium.

Okay, that’s the end of this column and you can now hang me in the toilet.

Today is Nylon Day

Never serve nylon food to a Serbo-Croat in polyester

By Nury Vittachi
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Today, as everyone knows, is Nylon Day: the anniversary of the day the world’s most celebrated (in the journalistic sense of “hated”) synthetic fabric was invented.

                You may be thinking: why would anyone want to celebrate nylon? It’s icky stuff that makes the wearer fidget and sweat and smell funny. To which I would reply: Are you implying that there’s something wrong with being fidgety and sweaty and smelling funny? Huh? Huh?

                Nylon has an amazing history. In the 1930s, a scientist made blobs of transparent plastic. When he went out to lunch, his naughty young assistants pulled them into pizza strings. When one string turned out to be several metres long, they realized that they had stumbled on an amazingly useful invention: plastic pizza strings.

                No, I mean synthetic thread. They made vast amounts of it and then tried to think of a purpose for it.

                But thinking is not that easy, especially for young males. Scientific tests prove that ninety per cent of male thoughts are about leggy women (the other ten per cent are about busty women). So not surprisingly, the first thing the guys came up with was the Nylon Stocking, launched in 1938. These led to the invention of sex in the 1940s, the baby boom in the 1950s, and Bob’s your uncle (or, quite possibly, your father).

                Although stockings came first, nylon was soon being used for a variety of garments, along with its sister fabric polyester (Latin for “cheap and revolting”), invented in the same lab.

Nylon eventually reached Europe and Asia.

But this tale has a sad ending. The Serbo-Croats noticed that French were unable to mention nylon without sneering.  “Zut alors! Sank God you are wearing tres chic Parisian leather trousieurs instead of ’orrible American nylon pants,” they would say.

                The Serbo-Croats thought nylon meant nasty, and that’s what the word now means in their language. “Don’t stay there, it’s a nylon hotel,” they advise tourists. “It’s got nylon food and it’s near a nylon beach.”

                If a Serbo-Croatian approaches you wearing a suit made of man-made fibres, never say: “You’re looking very nylon today.” You could start another war.

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BAFFLING INSTRUCTIONS DEPARTMENT: A reader from Malaysia sent the following message: “The cardboard cupholders at Starbucks each contain a small block of text making two points. One is that the things are recycled. And other is that they are for single use only. Er?”
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READERS’ LETTERS DEPARTMENT: I wrote recently that in Swaziland, the most powerful woman had to be addressed as “The She-Elephant”. I also said you should not try this at your home or workplace. Well, I got a sad note from one reader.  “I ignored your warning and tried the She-Elephant thing in my office,” wrote Peter Emmett. “I should have heeded your warning.” Too bad, Peter. My office also has a powerful woman at its heart. We just call her “Sir”.
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BAFFLING ROAD INSTRUCTIONS DEPARTMENT. Reader David Wijekoon-Perera saw a sign on the road in Kurunegala, Sri Lanka: “Tourists bewearing, all cars have right of turns at the left corner road.”
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GRATUITOUS ABUSE OF WESTERNERS DEPARTMENT: When a French Canadian politician was applauded by an American audience, he beamed, "Thank you for giving my wife and me the clap. I thank you from the heart of my bottom.”

What the shrinking dollar means for Asia

Falling currency means that we all end up dirt-poor
By Nury Vittachi

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I’ve just come back from the bank, where I had to change money from one currency to another. This really annoys me. In the queue, I worked out that if you change your money 13 times, you end up flat broke without actually having bought anything. Worse still, I’ve just realized I change money 14 times a year. That means I can save time and energy by just staying at home and burning my life savings.
               In ancient times, when the world was young (and Keith Richards had already began to rot), the practice of changing one form of money to another every time you crossed a national border began.
              This was particularly bad news for people from South Asia. Their currency, the rupee, was set at a very low exchange rate: one rupee was equal to one speck of dirt.
              I recall my father’s long face every time we used an airport money-changer. We got a handful of dirt. And those were the good days. Other times we just got a laugh.

Today, everything has changed. The various brands of rupee are still worthless, but thanks to financial terminology, the situation is expressed far more elegantly. We now say 0.9897 rupees equals 0.9897 specks of dirt or 1.075 seconds of laughter, which I think you’ll agree sounds better.

In the old days, the most confusing currency was the Pound, a British banknote which (rather suspiciously, I thought) weighed only a fraction of a pound.

The British currency was famously complex. The pound was divided into shillings, pence, florins and penny-farthings, coins which were so large they were used in Britain as bicycle wheels. The British also had a huge variety of coins, such as guineas, half-crowns, tuppences, quids, grands, optics, drams and snifters.

The first transaction I ever had on a visit to London went something like this:

Me: How much is that?

Airport shopkeeper: Two grand, a guinea-half-crown, three shillings, half a snifter and tuppeny-ha’pence-farthing.

Me: Oh. Do you accept rupees?

Airport shopkeeper: Yes sir. That’ll be forty googillion rupees, but I will have to give you the change in dirt and sneers.

Only after I got a job as a financial journalist did I learn how the system worked. The main world currency was the US dollar, colloquially known as Greenspans. The Greenspan was divided into bucks, dimes, nickels, quarters, eighths, sixteenths, semi-colons, jots and iotas.

               And after many years of earning a monthly handful of dirt in Asia, I eventually got a job where I was paid in a currency fixed to US dollars. I pictured myself swanning back to my home town, pockets overflowing with Greenspans.

                But what happened? From the day I started that job, the US dollar started falling in value. Down and down it went, into a hole which makes the Marianas Trench look like a scratch in a piece of marble or Kim Jong-Il’s head, whichever is denser.

               The last time I visited Sri Lanka, I took a wad of US dollars and a wad of rupees.  This was the way to get a good deal, I said to myself. No such luck. At the airport in Colombo, I checked out the rates for both my currencies at the moneychangers. I got two handfuls of dirt and a double-portion of sniggers.