Maltese inflation
As we approach the date when the government’s budget for 2020 will be unveiled, it is natural that, as always happens, the cost of living gets raised as a high profile issue.
However it is curious that in today’s circumstances, the fact remains that compared to how I remember it did register in the past, the inflation rate is relatively low. Up to August this year, on an annual basis, it reached 1.9 per cent – not so very different from the median rate prevalent in the eurozone. It all reflects the fundamentals of a period – which apparently will not end soon – in which European inflation has remained well below past “traditional” levels, a factor that continues to underpin what effectively amounts to stagnation in the euro economies.
Maltese economic growth has stayed buoyant in a way that... Well, I would not like to repeat that it is “unprecedented”: but that’s the truth.
Despite what will be claimed in the coming months, inflation here has remained relatively low, which again, is unprecedented. Why is this happening?
There is one disquieting feature in the overall picture: the highest rise in prices up to August happened for food and non-alcoholic drinks. It stood at 3.6 per cent and would surely have hit most those households having lower incomes.
I was recently visited by a Facebook team. From what the three executives attending told me, it is clear that to back the rather informal package which shows up on our mobile screens, there is a huge and sophisticated operation. It could hardly have been otherwise given the billions of messages that travel daily through the Facebook system. I understood that they have offices in practically all European capitals.
Their operation is technologically, cutting edge. They explained how they proceed with their equipment and computer programmes to recognise and capture messages with unacceptable or criminal content. Though I believe they are doing their best on this score, even they have to admit that they are “not always” spot on.
They wanted to explain how careful they are to protect the privacy of Facebook users. There is no way I could take at face value what they might have said on this matter. Absolutely, I cannot believe that the private information available to Facebook does not eventually get used for commercial or even indeed political ends, if not directly by Facebook animators, then by other interests.
Immigration in France
All of a sudden, French President Macron has changed direction. He is insisting that the government should put immigration at the top of its political agenda. Up to not so long ago, the topic was apparently being ignored by the macronistas. The President and his people were busy proclaiming everywhere the call to promote European solidarity and humanism. There was nothing to criticise about this – to the contrary.
Now, Macron has been saying: The immigration issue does not concern the bourgeois strata in society. These live in their own districts and are not affected by it. But the popular strata are not in that situation. We cannot ignore them any more.
Rarely has the immigration problem been described in such a straight forward fashion.
The weakest link
When an administrative process to regulate or monitor affairs, requires the participation of a number of institutions that depend on each other to ensure that affairs move forward, there is a need for strict coordination between them, if efficient implementation is to be ensured.
Clearly, each and every institution needs to be itself efficient. If anyone is not, the process will stall and indeed could be stopped completely. It’s like links tied into a chain. The material used could be of the toughest steel but the chain will only be as strong as its weakest link.
This conclusion holds right now for the institutional players in the financial services sector. Improvements there cannot follow simply from the introduction of the necessary new procedures. Alongside them, efforts need to be deployed so that all institutions involved are operating from the inside and on the outside, forcefully and effectively.
Brexit... again...
How empty and superfluous sound the position statements and speculations regarding the situation in the UK about Brexit, especially when they are made by... let’s call them third parties... who in the present state of affairs, have no voice in the negotiating chapter, or what’s left of it.
The UK is undergoing its greatest political crisis of the last ninety years or so. The normal ways by which the country operates its parliamentary democracy are jammed. The options for the future remain clouded in fog. There is no majority in favour of any one option. And unfortunately, the chances are that this political turbulence will grow.
For somebody like me who still has a very soft spot for the UK, the ongoing confusion is nothing less than a tragedy. It hardly matters who is responsible for it. “Official” comments made at the margin of the central negotiations simply serve to amplify the noise generated around Brexit, nothing more.
Hella Haase
Though it’s been quite a while since I got to know about Hella S Haase, a leading Dutch novelist, only recently did I get down to reading anything of hers - in this case, a historical novel about Rome’s last pagan poet,
Claudius Claudianus, from the fifth century AD. In translation it was titled “The taste of bitter almonds”.
During the last ten years, since the murder of the politician who had been his patron, Claudianus has been in hiding. He is now charged in court before a judge who like him had in his youth, come to Rome from Alexandria. The two have followed contrasting careers, for the judge got integrated in the dominant Christian structures that ruled in Rome, which was sacked only a year previously by the Vandals. The poet earns a living by teaching literature and is now under suspicion of working to promote banned pagan practices. We witness the confrontation between the two men.
Haase’s writing is effective because it uses words sparingly. Perhaps indeed, her style is too economical. To understand well the development of the plot when a quarter through the novel, I needed to carry out some separate “research” about the life of Claudianus. Perhaps it would have been better to have first sampled instead one of Haase’s “Indonesian” novels.
Till the next time...
“For somebody like me who still has a very soft spot for the UK, the ongoing confusion is nothing less than a tragedy