22nd September 2001 

With stock markets still falling and the likelihood of military action against terrorist bases in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the next few days, economists are painting a gloomy picture for the next few months.

Chairman of America’s Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan was reported to have confessed concern about the U.S. economy, but also said he thought more time was needed to see where the U.S. economy was headed and exactly what the impact of the terrorist attacks may eventually prove to have had on the situation.

Despite a brief upturn for the FTSE100 in London on Monday as the New York markets opened for the first time since the previous Tuesday’s horrific events, a continuing slide of stock prices in the U.S. resulted in the Dow Jone index registering its largest one week loss since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Dow Jones index finished 1370 points lower at 8235.81, while in London the FTSE100 ended at 4433.7, although it had climbed during the afternoon from over 200 points lower.

Other European markets fared no better, with Frankfurt’s DAX 30 hitting its lowest level in 3 years, and the CAC 40 in Paris lost 2.28% on Friday alone to finish at 3652.

However, European finance ministers meeting in Liege, Belgium, rejected fears that their economies faced recession as a result of the terrorist attacks.

Short-term financial guarantees to assist airlines were agreed at the meeting, and the widespread falls on the stock markets were dismissed as "panic selling".

Businesses across the world were hit further this week with the outbreak of a new computer virus spreading rapidly across the Internet. "Nimda", first seen on Tuesday, brought many corporate networks to a halt as well as slowing areas of the Internet to a point where some systems became unusable. Unlike previous virus outbreaks (or, more technically in this case, "Internet Worm" outbreaks), "Nimda" seems to have been designed more to create network and Internet "traffic" on a colossal scale rather than to damage individual computers or data. Unusually, the virus can spread through open Internet connections as well as by e-mail, and has the ability to create its own user accounts on computer systems and to designate drives that were previously private as shared. Experts believe the outbreak is not over, although the worst damage is now being repaired.

I hear that the Department of Education has produced some interesting guidelines for history teachers of children aged 9 to 11. If the teachers feel the details of World War II might be too much for the little angels in their class, they may instead study the life of John Lennon. The National Curriculum suggests classes should listen to John Lennon’s song "Imagine", and "develop their vocabulary" by discussing words and phrases associated with John Lennon such as "peace movement" and "flower power".

So. Is this perhaps a suggestion that John Lennon’s life may have been as important an event in the history of Britain as World War II? Are the children supposed to emulate the life of the former member of the Beatles? Perhaps, one might hope, the study might not dwell on John Lennon’s interest in marijuana, his comments that he failed all his O-levels because he was more interested in cigarettes and girls, or his announcement in 1965 that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. And perhaps they might concentrate on his undoubted contribution to world peace.

I have to wonder whether there is any value in studying the peacemakers unless one also studies the reasons for their efforts. Or am I just being politically incorrect? That would be a pity, wouldn’t it?

Finally for this week, I saw an interesting headline on Yahoo News. The headline read "UK e-commerce escapes recession" and the first couple of lines visible without clicking on the link implied that Britain’s web sites are becoming more professionally structured as more and more people are connecting to the Internet.

Well worth reading more, I thought, and clicked to see, "Document Not Found. The page may no longer exist."

Oh well. Perhaps we still have some way to go......

And as a postscript, you may have noticed this week’s News Comment is a little shorter than usual, and I have almost completely avoided the most important topic of the last two weeks’ news.

I think there has been more than enough comment, speculation, opinion and gossip about it elsewhere. On this particular subject I have nothing to say that hasn’t already been said over and over again.

Take care, everyone. And let us all hope common sense and common humanity prevail.