So far it’s an epidemic, not a pandemic. But it has swept across the globe and left chaos in its wake. I am talking, of course, about Swine Flu Flop - the highly contagious market-sapping disease that has seen billions of dollars wiped of the values of certain stock, ever since the influenza outbreak in Mexico.
In just one day last week, as the WHO ramped up its pandemic alert from stage three to stage four, shares dived worldwide. Travel and leisure firms have been hit the hardest, as industry bellwether British Airways dropped eight percent on April 26 while Lufthansa, Europe’s second largest airline, fell more than 12 percent. Air China dropped 13 percent, and Carnival, the cruise operator poised to begin operations in the Gulf, jumped 2.2 percent on news it had scrapped afternoon stopoffs in Acapulco.
So what’s in store for Gulf stocks? At the region’s bourses, investors should certainly be on high alert for Swine Flu Flop. The majority of state-backed travel and leisure firms aren’t listed, so we may have to wait to see if there’s been any significant impact. But it can’t be much fun for the national carriers, or their private competitors. The Gulf is one of the globe’s biggest transit hubs, and with people avoiding airports for fear of picking something up from other travellers, there are sure to be empty seats in the sky.
Ps. Pharmaceutical firms are looking at the whole thing in a different light, of course Roche, the Swiss maker of Tamiflu, climbed almost six percent as news spread of the virus. Rival GlaxoSmithKline, which makes the influenza treatment Relenza, gained 7.6 percent. As ever, it’s good to see the drug companies doing well. Do we think they’ll drop the prices of their drugs as a result of the good times?

Daft, am I? Bigoted? Ignorant? Well if that’s the case, tell that to the UAE government, as well as the government of Bahrain. Each has now taken the sensible step of banning imports of pork products.
As the WHO health warnings become graver and graver, so we realize how little we know about this deadly virus. As I cautioned in my last blog, why not be safe rather than sorry in this circumstance? I am proud to see that our governments are stepping forward and making wise decisions, and am sure that others will follow suit.
And as for the reader who suggested I had Mad Cow Disease, that’s actually a good illustration of my point. If people in Britain had been warned about infected beef earlier in the day, then they would have stopped eating it, and fewer would have succumbed to the awful disease. Who’s to say the same thing isn’t true of swine flu?

This website has unearthed new rental data from RERA that looks certain to form the basis of the next Dubai Rental Index.

A new service on the the Dubai Real Estate Regulatory Authority’s web site allows landlords and tenants to enter details of their type of accommodation, current rent, and the name of their residential district. The web site then gives a guide price for how much rent should be paid.

However, the RERA web site stops short of publishing a full table of rents, so Arabianbusiness.com has put in the leg work to produce what is, in effect, the April 2009 Rental Index.

Having created the table, we then looked at the change in rents for every applicable area since the Index was last published in January 2009.

For villas, we compared median prices for three-bedroom homes; for apartments we compared median prices for two-bedroom units.

The results are startling. In the four months since the Rental Index was last published, rents have plummeted by almost 50 percent in some parts of the city.

Freehold developments have been worst affected, with two-bedroom apartment rents for Jumeirah Lakes Towers, Dubai Investment Park and Dubai Silicon Oasis all registering price drops of well over 40 percent.

Villa rental drops in the freehold areas have also been battered. Rents for a three bedroom villa in The Springs fell by 45 percent. Green Community, The Meadows and Arabian Ranches have all seen rents fall by one-third.

Table 1: Rental Index for Apartments (AED,000 per annum). Residential Areas are ranked according to the price change for a two-bedroom apartment.

Table 2: Rental Index for Villas (AED,000 per annum). Residential Areas are ranked according to the price change for a three-bedroom villa.

When I was six years old my cat, Wembley, came home one day with a limp. My dad asked me what we should do. Apparently I informed him that I was the child and that he was the grown-up, and that he, therefore, should know what to do. Difficult to argue with that.

Imagine my horror then, when I grew up and discovered that adults are, despite appearances, no more clued-up than children. Indeed, you could argue that it’s worse – at least innocent kids don’t pretend to know something that they don’t; to be something that they’re not.

Let’s take bankers, for example. The people that we entrust with our ‘hard-earned’ have been getting a bad press recently. Yesterday at the General Meeting of the Belgian Banking giant, Fortis, the chairman was bombarded with shoes and other projectiles. But until not so long ago the average “Joe” would see the role of a banking boss as being an important and prestigious job, to be filled by a kind man, with a sensible haircut, who would help us mere mortals water our money and watch it grow.

Not now. The trust has gone, thanks to the likes of Sir Fred Somebody-or-other who used to Captain the good ship RBS…until he sailed it into an iceberg that is. This guy, at some point in the past, must have impressed somebody somewhere and convinced them that, when it came to looking after money, he knew what he was doing. The fact that he presided over the biggest annual loss in UK corporate history last year is evidence to suggest otherwise. He lost a whopping £24 billion in one year. That’s more than Elton John spends on flowers.

So the mess created by banks has to be cleaned up by Politicians. They run countries so they must know what they’re doing, right? Don’t be so sure.

The UK Government announced their latest budget this week, with the inappropriately-named Alistair Darling taking centre stage. He did not cover himself in glory by announcing that, as of next year, anyone earning more than £150,000 a year will pay 50% income tax. This is a clear breach of the Labour Party’s 2005 manifesto promise not to raise the basic or higher rates of tax. In other words, they lied. Even six -year-olds know that lying is wrong.

Not only that, but Darling has shown a blatant disregard for the situation in which he finds himself. The people who will lead Britain out of recession are hard-working business people who build small businesses, grow them, and employ more and more people. They need to be offering tax breaks for those people, not just more of a tax burden. But despite this Darling intends to increase government borrowing to unprecedented and monumental levels thereby further burdening the shoulders of the people for as far into the future as the eye can see.

As with bankers and politicians, so with doctors and medics. My limited experience has left me disappointed. I have had back problems for five years now and none of the many physios or surgeons, osteopaths or chiropractors has, like Alistair Darling, been able to make the pain go away. Let us hope that the swine flu medics have more success with their latest project.

In an attempt to take my mind off the fact that no one seems to know what they are doing as I once thought they did, I have decided that I am going to take up photography this summer. I have no experience, nor any real understanding, of how to take a good photograph. This new challenge would not have daunted me if I still held the youthful philosophy that grown-ups should instinctively know what to do.

Now, of course, I am old enough to know better.

A pre-pandemic panic is just the shot in the arm every government needs right now. Ministries for Silly Suits are also pretty pleased with events of the past few days.

In the not so distant past, governments with economic or political difficulties at home would start wars abroad to divert attention away from their domestic failures.

These days, a decent health scare story in a distant part of the globe can work just as well.

To date, there have been fewer than 150 deaths from swine flu, all of them in Mexico. And the death toll did not rise at all overnight.

News crews have been despatched to chase down the merest whiff of a new case in their home countries. This morning I watched a breathless reporter at Manchester Airport in the north of England describe how a couple returning from honeymoon in Mexico had developed flu symptoms on the flight home.

In a tone that suggested the world is about to end, the reporter described how the couple are now recovering at home under the medical supervision of their local doctor. In other words, they’ve been sent home to watch TV on the sofa with a couple of aspirin.

The paltry nature of this current health scare has not deterred beleaguered politicians from spinning the news to their own advantage.

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, speaking from a press conference in Poland this morning, announced that he would be back in London to chair a meeting of the COBRA disaster response committee within hours.

What glee! This is a politician heading a bankrupt government who can’t contain his excitement at the opportunity to look like he’s saving the world yet again. A mercy dash back from Poland, followed by a committee meeting that sounds like it ought to be chaired by Sylvester Stallone.

I’m almost expecting to see him striding up Downing Street wearing the very latest biohazard protection suit. The colourful versions modelled here by scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States, should portray the right level of seriousness for the situation.