David Barrie

You've been shopping - we won't tell...

Hidden away in the packaging options of designer fashion retailer Net-a-Porter.com is something shocking.

If I was a right-wing columnist, I'd have a field day. A person who harbored the need to drive a flat-bed truck in to a designer store, my excuse. An anti-packaging eco-warrior, confused. 

For first, we had the worry of men hanging around fairgrounds offering kids sweeties.

Then, we had clinics and pharmacies handing out methadone to heroin users.

Now, we have Net-a-Porter offering 'Discreet Packaging'.

As an email shot said earlier this week:

Hide all your fabulous NET-A-PORTER purchases from inquisitive eyes with our new Discreet Packaging. Your secret is safe with us! Your items will arrive in an unbranded recycled brown paper bag and we'll be the only ones who know...

In other words,

You've been shopping - we won't tell ....

Fortunately, I'm a slut for fashion. And no Iron Man. But if you don't believe me, go here and click on Packaging Options.

But please be aware - and this is an act of exceptional public service - that the anonymous package just delivered to our door might not be a part for your ventilation system, a bulk purchase of lo-price instant coffee from Staples or a job-lot of ricin - but something by Balmain that nestles on Rodarte heels. 

Remember, Shhh...your secret is safe with us...

Image by Fulanoinc.

 

Someday it will happen...

The speed with which it's happening is worrying.

But the politics may be pleasing...

Exposure of the contradictions and fealties of the triumphalist capitalism we've lived through over the last ten years.

Newspapers in the UK are starting to fill with stories that demonstrate how the new money order is in crisis and political relationships and value systems are going up the Kyber.

First, the London Financial Times reports that the Russian government has made $50bn of state aid available to help finance the external debt of the country's oligarchs.

But then ES Magazine salivates over the opening of a new branch of Gagosian in Moscow.

The Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne is caught soliciting money from Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

But at the same time his party is pushing itself forward as compassionate conservatives devoted to social responsibility and fraternity -  and going to work on a bike, not a yacht.

As Charlie Leadbeater writes in a brilliant article in this week's Spectator

The crisis may make us turn away from cosmopolitan connections.

It may also turn us towards

a simpler, back-to-basics capitalism.

But in its wake will also come all sorts of stuff like exposure of sham values of honesty and humility, of lazy media punting exuberant capitalism and posh people posing as friends of the pauper.

The challenge has got to be to get ahead of all of this.

As Charlie says

We should be searching for a new kind of capitalism.

He's right.

But the question is, what's the currency?

Here's a list

• Cash
• Energy
• Food
• Online social networks

Take your pick.

Image by Kent Rogowski.

A painter speaks...

Here's another antidote to the daily news of irredeemable credit default swaps and synthetic collateral debt obligations that don't, er, add up.

It's a call to arms to the visceral by German artist Gerhard Richter:

I pursue no objectives, no system, no tendency; I have no program, no style, no direction. I have no time for specialized concerns, working themes or variations that lead to mastery. I steer clear of definitions. I don't know what I want. I am inconsistent, noncommittal, passive; I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty.

So there.

Picture courtesy of Jorge Franganillo.

Deep pan localism

Over at real estate magazine Estates Gazette [subscription required], news arrives that as the credit crunch tightens, Domino's Pizza is opening outlets in the U.K. at the rate of almost one store a week.

In an article in a recent edition, a business development manager spills the beans - no, I'll forget the metaphors - that the local is the global, vice-versa and upside down.

We typically set an eight-minute delivery boundary, so that there can be quite a few stores in a small area that don't compete with each other because people order very locally.

The best performing 'customer category' is "Happy Families" -

typically a household in which both parents are working and living in a detached or semi-detached house on a new housing estate.

And according to the article, those who fall into the category of "Urban Intelligence" are also enthusiastic pizza consumers.

This term has little to do with IQ - it is simply people who tend to live in cities, and in apartments rather than houses.

I don't know whether any of this is true but it does make for a neat marketing formula:

Gentrification does not = organic fruit-bread sellers but = inorganic tuna and sweetcorn on spun dough.

And 'local' = a franchised global brand working within an eight-minute radius.

Image courtesy of Jill Greenseth.

Crunching on credit

It was on this parade of shops in Whitechapel, London in the 1970s, in a kosher restaurant called Blooms, that I had my first gherkin.

The British call the cucumber a Wally which is a bit of a shame since - in shape at least - it has graced the gardens of the Chatsworth House stately home in Derbyshire, England.

In some weird twist of fate, the (slightly) uncouth vegetable turned totally luxe when someone decided to call Norman Foster's chic Swiss Re building in the City of London "The Gherkin".

 

But now thanks to Norm and financial journalist Chris Blackhurst, the small, bitter and not actually very pleasant gurka has come of age.

Writing in real estate magazine Estates Gazette [subscription required], Blackhurst turns Foster's building in to a ready reckoner for measuring demand and supply of office space in the City of London.

Everywhere I go, should I meet any property developer with an interest in the Square Mile, the chat quickly gets on to the Gherkin.

So we've had a warning of 40,000 City job losses - or the equivalent of eight Gherkins (500,000 sq ft each, at 100 sq ft per person).

Meanwhile, Lehman Brothers analyst Mike Prew has calculated that a total of "11 Gherkins" are being built by developers.

All hail the Gherkin!

The indigestible cucumber has become as august a measure as the Roman Mile or French meridional definition.

5000 people = 1 Gherkin

30 people = a nibble on an indigestible stalk end.

Image of Whitechapel High Street, courtesy of Danny McL. Chatsworth, courtesy of  Dr Loplop.  Gherkin packers in Bangalore, courtesy of Lefranz. Foster's Gherkin, courtesy of  acampm1.   

Dark and new Satanic Mills

Over the last ten years, according to the London Financial Times, loans for prospective small-scale landlords have risen from 2% to 10% of all mortgages.

Thousands of newly built flats have been constructed in English cities such as Leeds, Manchester and Nottingham to fuel and sate demand.

But over-valuation, fake discounts, skimming by lenders, increases in mortgage costs and a simple lack of demand is witnessing thousands of these flats remaining empty or let at rents that do not cover mortgages.

Newspaper reports highlight the plight of investors with portfolios valued in millions now turning to dust, personally owing millions and fearing repossession of their own front doors.

Time to re-cast a famous poem?

And did those feet in ancient time

walk upon England’s mountains green?

And was the holy Lamb of God

on England’s pleasant pastures seen?

And did the countenance divine

shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here

among these dark Satanic Mills?

Pictures courtesy of Aeschli, Martin Q and  Sternology.

A new age of purgatory

According to Alex at Worldchanging

Optimism, especially optimism which is neither foolish nor silent, can be revolutionary.

I'm certain of this but just now nothing beats private equity investor David Rubenstein, CEO of the €1.1bn Carlyle Group, and his recent comment on the financial markets.

According to the London Financial Times,

Mr Rubenstein said that if 2007 was private equity's golden era, then 2008 marked the start of a new "purgatory age".

Thank your lucky stars that in Catholicism, Purgatory is a temporary punishment.

But remember that according to Dante, there's a problem...it's just one step up from Hell...and for a moment just check out who else is on the beach:

:-o

Despair image courtesy of Bruce Sterling.

Who owns your house?

The crunch in the credit markets and bailout of investment houses' bad debts has revealed the globalization, complexity and connectedness of financial markets.

It has highlighted a fistful of opaque financial instruments designed to spread or hedge risk.

And it has cast as savior, sovereign-wealth funds operating out of countries like Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and China.

Today's Financial Times reveals that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is about to reveal plans to 'kitemark' mortgages according to risk: part of a plan to ease the market for wholesale mortgage lending.

But can I ask a simple, naive question: who owns the mortgage on your house?

Until the current financial crisis, I thought that I knew: a building society, a bank or other lender.

Now I am confused.

Is the bank's equity owned by the financial institution you signed up with and kept somewhere safe, secure,  local and known? Say a box with a brass-plate on it?

Or has it disappeared in to the global morass, held by the Bank of Kazakhstan, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority or another institution answerable to those you have not democratically elected?

Is it being used as collateral to help finance other borrowers - at super-risky Northern Rock-style rates?

Or is it being used to support the buying of shares in Gazprom or to enable the risk incurred by contractors working on early ground work for a new terminal at Heathrow Airport?

Just now there is an emerging move to provide people with green mortgages.

Also for many years there have been well-established - if poor-performing - ethical investment funds.

In the future, will there be demand for more traceable mortgages and debts - products that make it clear who owns what and to whom?

Will the current crisis press for a review of the extent to which we are prepared to allow our livelihoods to be invested in the globalized economy?

The global-local debate is usually framed to take in issues of labor, natural resources, politics and culture.   

Perhaps now is the time to widen that agenda to include the roof over our head.

A seat guru speaks

 

The Wall Street Journal reports that

The current business cycle will go down in the history books as one which confirmed that leadership in the global economy is now shifting from the old industrial countries to the emerging market countries.

One eccentric indicator of the strength, value and nature of that emerging market is in medical tourism.

A recent research paper by a professor at the Harvard Business School plotted the rise of medical tourism for everything from cardiac care to plastic surgery to hip and knee replacements.

What used to be rare is now commonplace: traveling abroad to receive medical treatment, and to a developing country at that.

And a recent report in the Financial Times, London pointed up key destinations as Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Panama, Philippines, South Africa, Thailand and Turkey.

Some researchers are looking at whether US employers would be willing to pay for a covered employee's medical procedure of equivalent quality abroad so as to lower overall healthcare costs.

This change (or hobble) in the demographics of air travel is interesting.

Medical tourism also marks the purchase of services from emerging markets way beyond technical support for banking transactions, escape from IT hell or heavy-breathing.

But first things first.

Please take special care when retrieving your luggage from that overhead locker.

And when you can't get that seat by the emergency exit, kindly refrain from smoking in the toilets and discover your inner Mother Teresa.

Image courtesy of Geraldi.

Evolving Britain

Sometimes the ability of capitalism to absorb debate, trends and just get on with it is a joy to behold.

This is the headline of an advertisement by U.K. property development company Land Securities in last week's edition of real estate magazine Estates Gazette [subscription required].

The company is marketing one of its shopping malls that has space devoted especially to local and regional independent retailers. The ad goes on to say:

Evolving Britain needs cities with local character and identity. So in our recent redevelopment of the Princesshay centre in Exeter we reserved a street just for independent retailers.

In the last few years, Britain's high streets have become the battle-ground for debate on Clone Towns, with focus thrown on the prevalence and might of national and international grocery stores.

Hostilities have just broken out again with the publication by the Competition Commission of proposals to improve competition between grocery retailers in local markets and address relationships between retailers and their suppliers.

Journalists have taken up pro- and anti-supermarket positions. 

On one side is India Knight of The Times:

Supermarkets are like tower block housing: what once looked like the future now feels mired in the past and what once felt thrilling and new now seems tired and passé.

On the other is Sathnam Saghara writing in the same paper:

Does it matter to shoppers in Watford that their main shopping thoroughfare resembles the high street in Inverness? Isn't your average branch of Boots a nicer place to be than your average independent Happy Shopper?...And is it really true that independent retailers have character? One independent Indian convenience store/Portuguese café/fried chicken outlet seems much like any other to me.

Meanwhile the property market brilliantly adjusts its pitch.

Next month, there's a Slow Food Festival at LandSec's mall in Exeter, hosted by a deli called Chandos featuring wine by the glass and baguettes made up with their own shop produce.

In effect, Evolving Britain continues on its merry way, angsting about food and its distribution, rather than supply.

For grain prices are currently at record highs around the world.

Pakistan recently launched ration cards to provide subsidised food for nearly 7m households.

And last week an undersecretary at the (alarmingly called) Ministry for Social Solidarity in Egypt - the world's largest importer of wheat -  revealed that

The bread subsidy alone went up by around $820m last year to reach $2.45bn.

There's a simple message in all of this: Evolving Britain...worry not about where you buy your bread - but do worry about what it costs.