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Business Weekly Archive: Recession, power shifts - and trousers

Bulletins

10/04/2009

Recession, power shifts - and trousers

BBC World Service - Business Weekly Archive, Recession, power shifts - and trousers

The changes wrought by recession,  power shifts across the Pacific, and bankers' trousers.

Business Weekly reflects on changes wrought by recession:  the movement of economic power across the Pacific, and the movement of redundant bankers' trousers from up to down -  or so it is alleged.

Business Weekly reflects on big changes wrought by recession:  the movement of economic power across the Pacific - or not, depending in your confidence in America.  The movement of money from newspapers to the internet.  And the movement of redundant bankers' trousers from up to down, or so it is alleged.

When the history books get written, there's no doubt that this recession will be one of those turning points.

The Depression in the 1930s transformed attitudes and led to painful turmoil, not to mention war and a belief in the state as saviour.  Even if this one is nowhere near as bad, it's clear that all kinds of beliefs are now being questioned.  

There is now, for example, a widespread assertion that America has let everyone else down by borrowing beyond its means and that its economic power is now shifting away.  On this scenario, the Asian manufacturing countries will be relatively unhurt by recession, and poised to gain when we all emerge.  

Kishore Mahbubani is a professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore.  He thinks a time of Western smugness is over.

The recession isn't helping a lot of daily newspapers.  London's Evening Standard has just been sold to a Russian oligarch for less than two dollars - the whole thing not just an eiditon you might buy on the way home.  American papers from San Francisco to Boston are in difficulty.  The Sydney Morning Herald and the Age in Melbourne have merged parts of their coverage. 

Advertising always suffers in a recession but this time, it's only crystallised a change that was happening anyway - i.e. the internet and the explosion of alternative places to advertise.  

To discuss all this, Business Weekly turned to Roger Parry who's on the board of a string of big media companies in Britain and before that was chief executive of Clear Channel International, then the world's largest operator of radio stations, concert promotions and outdoor advertising.  

Finally, we dwell on the plight of the former Masters of the Universe - the bankers whose ingenuity helped get us into the current mess, and some of whom now find themselves out of jobs.  And out of their trousers too, if you believe our regular commentator Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times

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