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NYT > World Business
European Leaders Vow to Fight Financial Crisis
Sun, 05 Oct 2008 07:25:16 -0000
Despite their pledge, the leaders of Europe’s largest economies failed to offer a systemwide answer to a credit crisis that has forced them to bail out several banks in just the past week.
Boomtown of Dubai Feels Effects of Global Crisis
Sun, 05 Oct 2008 07:26:25 -0000
As recession looms in the West, cracks are appearing in the boom that has made Dubai a global byword for unfettered growth.
European Banks Expect to Benefit From the Chaos in Their Industry
Sat, 04 Oct 2008 05:27:49 -0000
Executives at Europe’s still-solvent giants see an opportunity to crack businesses long dominated by more nimble American companies brought low by the financial crisis.
Germans Approach Bailouts With Reluctance
Sat, 04 Oct 2008 05:23:25 -0000
Most German citizens are unhappy about the notion of paying billions for bad mortgage bets made by their financial institutions.
Bailout Bill Fails to Reassure Investors
Sat, 04 Oct 2008 04:03:25 -0000
Wall Street finally got what it had been demanding all week, a financial rescue package, but investors had already turned their attention to other problems in the economy.
Netherlands Takes Over Fortis’s Dutch Operations
Sat, 04 Oct 2008 09:44:49 -0000
The deal comes less than a week after the government of the Netherlands, along with Belgium and Luxembourg, had agreed to invest 11.2 billion euros in Fortis.
Portfolio.com: Business Travel
Fly the Unfriendly Skies
Tue, 30 Sep 2008 04:00:00 -0000
The nation's financial upheaval has sucked so much oxygen out of the media room that we've barely gotten coverage of a horrific bombing of the Marriott in Islamabad 10 days ago and the September 17 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Sana'a, Yemen. But out of media sight is not out of business travelers' minds. We know what this stuff means to our lives on the road. We all have a playbook, a set of time-tested rules honed during a generation of terrorism aimed at travelers in general and U.S. business travelers in specific.Shorn of politics, polemics, and the ideology, staying safe when traveling internationally often starts with a simple assumption: Avoid anything that smacks of U.S. capitalism. U.S. flag airlines, lodgings flying the flag of an American hotel chain, and even American fast-food outlets have disproportionately been targets of terrorists in the last 40 years.The Islamabad bombing on September 20 is a textbook example. The hotel building is owned by a Pakistani businessman. The heavily guarded property is just a few hundred yards from the prime minister's residence. The bombers seemed interested in making a statement about internal Pakistani politics. Most of the hundreds who were killed and wounded were not Americans. But the Marriott name drew business travelers from around the world and made the bombing more newsworthy, because it was seen as an attack on an icon of U.S. business.America's high-profile allies often pay too. No U.S. airline serves Pakistan, but British Airways got the message. Two days after the Marriott bombing, B.A. canceled its flights from London to Islamabad indefinitely."I've put British airlines and hotels on the 'do not use' list too," the travel manager of a major multinational corporation told me last week. "I think our experienced travelers knew instinctively without being told, but our newbies need to be reminded. In troubled times, you lower your profile and avoid as many symbols of Western commerce and culture as you can."Back in the day, that often meant switching from a U.S. airline to a "neutral" carrier like Swissair; KLM, the Dutch airline; or SAS, the international airline of Scandinavia. But Swissair is out of business. SAS is less omnipresent than it used to be, and KLM is now part of a company controlled by Air France—and has issues, as vividly shown by last week's on-board terrorist arrests at a German airport. These days, travel managers tell me, the neutral airlines are carriers such as Singapore Air or Air Canada, which offers decent worldwide connections via its Toronto hub. Lufthansa and Japan Airlines are also perceived to be safe, although it's worth nothing that no carrier is immune to a potential terrorist attack. Many travel managers and security consultants I know recommend their clients use hotels that cater to Japanese business travelers. Japanese travelers are especially sensitive to personal security, and Japanese corporations conduct extensive safety audits of hotels where they book top executives. Unfortunately, the world's terrorists aren't focused solely on U.S. icons, so you need to do a lot of work to minimize your risk. Here are some tips that have proven valuable in previous periods of travel insecurity.Get Better Global Intelligence U.S. news outlets do a poor job of covering international affairs. Americans have been told nothing about a recent resurgence of violence in Spain blamed on ETA, the Basque separatist group. An alarming upswing in crime and kidnappings in Mexico's largest cities has been ignored too. Even relatively savvy U.S. travelers may not have heard about the instability in Bolivia, which has become so severe that American Airlines last week suspended its flights there.To fill the information gap, start with the country-specific data sheets published by the U.S. State Department. To offset any perceived bias (some critics claim that the State Department is too hard on our adversaries and turns a blind eye to troubles in countries we consider allies), check with the similar services offered by the British, Canadian, and Australian governments. The C.I.A.'s World Factbook is also useful.You needn't rely solely on government sources, of course. The BBC's news-gathering operation is available online, which links to more than 1,800 global TV streams, including useful news channels in dozens of languages. And if you travel overseas regularly, get on the HotSpots mailing list of the ASI Group. The free newsletter offers a daily snapshot of breaking travel and security news around the world. Rely on the Locals Even if you have help from a corporate travel department and do your own homework, make sure to consult your most valuable resource: The people on the ground where you're headed. Whether it's a branch office or a potential client, locals usually have the best advice . They'll often be more frank on a one-on-one basis, so contact them individually via a personal mobile phone or private email address.Lower Your Profile Dress casually, not like a well-to-do executive. Leave expensive luggage, high-priced clothing, and the bling at home. Don't advertise your name or company affiliation by using your business card as your luggage tag. Needless to say, don't take risks you wouldn't take at home. Choose Your Lodgings Carefully Book rooms in hotels that offer accommodations on a concierge, club, or executive floor. (They provide an additional, if small, layer of security.) And make sure you use hotels that offer a full range of in-house services: valet parking (so you don't have to enter a garage or parking lot); limo service (so you needn't rely on street cabs); and on-site restaurants, meeting rooms, cocktail lounges, business centers, and health clubs.Beware of Crime As frightening and dangerous as terrorism is, more international business travelers fall victim to garden-variety street crimes. Travel with as little cash as possible—and don't flash your wallet or your wad. Have copies of all valuable documents (passports and visas) and credit-card information in case you are victimized. Make sure you know the location and contacts for the nearest U.S. embassy or consulate. And never hang the "Make up my room" tag on your hotel-room doorknob. It's an obvious tip-off that the room is empty—and ripe for a burglary. If you need maid service, call housekeeping.The Fine Print... A follow-up on two recent columns: The new JetBlue Airways terminal at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport that we mentioned two weeks ago has been delayed until October 22. And as predicted in last week's column, the upheaval on Wall Street has had impacted premium-class travel to London. Through the end of the year, American Airlines is offering a free companion ticket for future travel when you fly to Britain and Delta Air Lines is offering double miles on selected flights to London and France.Related LinksTips for a Sky-High SpringLuggage in LimboThe Next Small Thing in the Skies
Frequent Fliers and Flame Retardants
Wed, 24 Sep 2008 04:00:00 -0000
A recent study released in Sweden about flame retardants showing up in the cabin air inside commercial airliners—and inside passengers, at high levels—may shed light on a mystery that I discovered in 2006. That year, I happened to be in an airport waiting for a long flight when I got the news that swirling inside my body were levels of flame retardants 12 times higher than average in the U.S., and 100 times higher than levels found in Europeans. The results were delivered by phone from a specialist on polybrominated diphenyl ethers—P.D.B.E.'s—a type of flame retardant that until recently was added for safety to products ranging from mattresses and clothing to plastics and electronics found in televisions, computers, and on airplanes. P.D.B.E.'s are mixed into products such as airline tray tables, seats, carpet, and wiring to raise the temperature at which they would otherwise ignite, making them harder to burn. These chemicals save hundreds of lives a year from death by fire, but they also can break loose as gas and particles released into the air, where they attach to dust that people can breath in. In mice and rats, high doses of P.D.B.E.'s interfere with thyroid and liver function, and cause neurological problems that include impairment of learning and memory. They also have caused problems with neurological development in fetuses and newborns. P.D.B.E.'s are suspected carcinogens—which has led the European Union to ban them. In the U.S., California has banned some versions of these chemicals, and Washington State has banned them all. Scientists have found P.D.B.E.'s all over the Earth, in polar bears in the Arctic, cormorants in England, and killer whales in the Pacific. When I was tested for my levels of this chemical and hundreds of others for an article in National Geographic, I expected to have normal levels of P.D.B.E.'s—until Åke Bergman of Lund University in Sweden phoned from Stockholm. He asked me if I was sitting down and then paused for what seemed like a very long time. "I hope you are not nervous, but your concentration is very high," Bergman said in a light Swedish accent. My blood level of one particularly toxic P.D.B.E., found primarily in U.S.-made products, is 249 parts per billion—that's 12 times the mean found in a recent Centers for Disease Control study that tested thousands of Americans. My levels would be high even if I were a worker in a factory making the stuff, Bergman said. Yikes, I thought, glad that I was sitting down, though Bergman hastily assured me that even my levels were a long way off from being dangerous—as far as anyone knows. Trying to get to the bottom of why my levels might be so high, Bergman quizzed me: Had I recently bought a mattress or sheets, or a new car? Did I work for many hours near a new computer? I kept answering no until I got an idea: Could my onboard stash of flame retardants come from airplanes? "Yah," said Bergman, "do you fly a lot?" Yes, I said, I log about 200,000 miles a year. "Interesting," Bergman says, telling me that he has long been curious about P.D.B.E. exposure inside airplanes, whose plastic and fabric interiors are drenched in flame retardants to meet safety standards set by the Federal Aviation Administration and its counterparts overseas. Since 2004, Boeing and other plane manufacturers say they have been phasing out the worst forms of P.D.B.E.'s, but these chemicals remain on older planes. At the time of the call, Bergman was hoping to run tests of P.D.B.E. concentrations in airplane air, and inside frequent fliers. Now he and his team at Lund have done just that—although he cautions this is just a preliminary study with a few test subjects. The study followed nine passengers who traveled on long flights of nine to eleven hours. They took air samples on their flights, and had their levels of P.D.B.E.'s tested in their blood before and after boarding. The scientists found that the air onboard was thick with P.D.B.E.'s at high levels. The "after" levels in their blood also showed significant increases—though they were still far less than mine. "The findings from this pilot study call for investigations of occupational exposures to P.D.B.E.'s in cabin and cockpit crews," concludes Bergman and his team. The data I had sent to Bergman comes from the relatively new science of "biomonitoring," which uses new technologies to detect and measure for the first time even tiny levels of chemicals in people and animals. Reports from the Centers for Disease Control have found detectable levels of chemicals ranging from pesticides and dioxins to plastic additives such as Bisphenyl-A inside people. The dangers of such miniscule levels to people is unknown, though biomonitoring technologies are a crucial first step to finding out if these chemicals that protect us from fire and give us products that are basic to our civilization are causing harm or not. In most cases, people aren't dropping dead. Even my 249 parts per billion is still far below a threshold that would cause alarm. (One part per billion is like adding a drop or two of red die into an Olympic-size swimming pool). But it's hard to know whether there is subtle, long-term damage such as cancer and neurological deficits. Last year, the European Parliament passed a new law—called R.E.A.C.H., for Registration, Evaluation, Authorization, and Restriction of Chemicals—that requires new chemicals to be tested for toxicity and proved safe. This standard had not existed before in Europe, and still does not exist in the U.S., where regulators in most cases require testing only if a chemical is suspected to be toxic.Fortunately, safer flame-retardant materials exist, and are beginning to be used, although products with P.D.B.E.'s will be with us for a very long time—at home and in the air. This is not something to panic about, nor should it stop you from climbing onboard an airplane, although it should make us all want to find out more. You can also keep the dust down in your house and office, and buy goods from companies that claim to no longer use P.D.B.E.'s. These include Dell, Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Ericsson, Mitsubishi, and Sony. Personally, I still fly, though occasionally I glance at someone's dusty sneakers as they board and wonder if some of that will end up in my lung, with a bit of P.D.B.E. attached—and what this means. Related LinksLooking DownThen There Were NoneHow Bad Could Things Get?
A Run on the Bankers
Tue, 23 Sep 2008 04:00:00 -0000
As Wall Street remade itself last week and world financial markets buckled, I pored through some interview transcripts to reacquaint myself with the Horny Banker Theory of business travel.It goes something like this: Airlines can charge corporate fliers 10 or even 12 times more than vacationers because business travelers need to get where they are going fast, with no advance notice and no price questioned. Surely, I said to an airline chief executive a couple of years ago, there was a breaking point. As corporations cracked down on travel and entertainment spending, wouldn't they demand airlines stop soaking them?"Joe," the C.E.O. said knowingly, "there's always an investment banker who needs to get home in time for a date.""You're saying the entire airline pricing system rests on the mating practices of horny bankers?""Well…uh…well…I wouldn't say it exactly that way. But what's a couple of hundred dollars or even a couple of thousand more or less to someone who's working a billion-dollar deal on one coast and has a dinner date that evening on the other coast? Breakfast meeting in London to lock up a deal and then a flight home to New York in time for the opera—what's that worth to someone generating billions and earning millions?"I've never been convinced that the Horny Banker Theory held water, but we'll certainly find out now, won't we? No one argues that bankers and brokers, hormonally charged or otherwise, make up a disproportionately large slice of the airlines' most profitable segment: walk-up, full-fare, and premium-class fliers. In fact, the frequent-flying financial sector is what makes markets such as New York, London, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Dubai so attractive to profit-hungry airlines."This will be ugly," one glum airline executive distractedly mumbled last week as I was interviewing him on an unrelated matter. "If your highest-paying fliers disappear, your reason for flying the plane disappears."Although airline math is often slippery and approximate, it's not difficult to figure out why it's hard to replace a banker flying on business. Take the NyLon (New York to London) route, for example. Off the record, airlines say their best corporate clients pay about $5,000 for a business-class round-trip. While that's about half the published walk-up business-class fare, it's also about 10 times the lowest advance-purchase fare that leisure fliers pay.In other words, for every Lehman banker or Merrill Lynch broker who was laid off last week and now won't fly on business between New York and London, an airline will need to find 10 vacationers to take his place. And while 10 fliers paying $500 each in coach equals the revenue of one grounded banker, the profit margin isn't the same. Discretionary fliers are more difficult to reach, more expensive to convert into customers and must be advertised to and sold to again the next time they fly. Not to mention all the extra space, extra luggage, extra fuel, and extra attention that 10 leisure fliers require. Low-fare coach passengers are "ballast," one brutally honest airline executive told me not too long ago. "You fill up the back of the plane with them and hope you break even. They are there to allow you to fly five or six times a day between cities so you can offer the frequency of schedule to the high-paying business traveler."I didn't use the NyLon run as a random example. New York to London is the premier international route in the Western world, and its primary customers have been financial types. As banking and brokerage firms shifted employees between the key English-language financial centers, New York-London traffic boomed. According to British aviation regulators, about 1.7 million people traveled between the United States and Britain in June—and almost one in four of them flew the NyLon route.Five U.S. and British carriers (American, Delta, Continental, British Airways, and Virgin Atlantic) fly the route dozens of times each day. Three all-business-class carriers (Eos, Maxjet, and Silverjet) tried to crack the market in recent years; two of them flew into London's Stansted Airport, which has a nonstop rail connection to The City. And next year B.A. plans to launch what can only be called a banker's transatlantic limousine. The 28-seat, business-class-only flight will link New York to tiny London City Airport, just minutes by taxi from Canary Wharf, London's satellite financial hub. It's not just NyLon that will be hit by the ongoing financial meltdown, of course. Four of the six U.S. legacy carriers (American, United, Delta, and Continental) and two alternate airlines (JetBlue and Virgin America) fly between metropolitan New York and greater Los Angeles. The route is essentially a shuttle tying L.A.'s entertainment industry to New York's bankers. The same carriers run frequent service between New York and the San Francisco Bay to link the high-tech industry to Manhattan's money. And the front cabins of transpacific flights from Los Angeles and San Francisco are jammed with bankers heading to major Pacific Rim manufacturing and financial centers.Bankers and brokers also dominate Amtrak's Acela and the New York-Washington Air Shuttle route. They pay a walk-up fare of $340 one way—an incredible $1.59 a mile—to fly the 214 miles between New York's LaGuardia Airport and Washington's Reagan National. That's about 13 times more on a per-mile basis than the average fare that airlines charge nationwide.What's it all mean? After a decade that has seen 9/11, serial bankruptcies, and a quintupling in the price of oil, airlines may now have to survive years without tens of thousands of their best and most profitable customers too. Horny or not, those folks are going to be missed.The Fine Print… A follow-up on last week's column about this season's new airport terminals. Detroit Metro opened without notable incident last Wednesday. But the schedule for the new Indianapolis terminal has changed. The airport will now hold an "open house" on October 11 and 12, but the big move of paying passengers and commercial flights will begin on November 11.Related LinksThe Skies Open OverseasThe Next Small Thing in the SkiesLater, London
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