Samoa & Tokelau have had their dateline changed they have jumped from 29 Dec to 31st Dec skipping a day in its entirety to aling with their major trading partners Australia and New Zealand.
Its New Years eve across the world & New Zealand's Chatam Islands has about 7 minutes to welcome the new year .
As i sit down to give final touches to this blog, Its a gray morning here , clouds seem to be all over the place and only few speckles of brightness around .
Doesn't that sound vaguely familiar?
Yes it does sound quite familiar as the year just gone by 2011 was an embodiment of bad news all around only with speckles of good news. It was a year of revolution in many countries mainly caused by usage of social networking often leading to overthrow of governments. 2011 will go down in the modern history books as a year where human will triumphed against all odds.
2011 started off on a cracking note , not in a figurative sense but a literal one . I was out with one of my closest friend Ramakrishnan , standing on the banks of River Thames to watch the fireworks in central London and welcome 2011. It was a spectacular affair and i was pleased that i heeded to my friends advice to see this spectacle and thoroughly enjoyed the fireworks , one of the best that i have ever seen.
February marked a shake-up to my personal life as i got engaged and started courtship period which climaxed in Sep i.e. marriage.
As things ploughed along in my personal life, real world was pushing hard and where ever one looked it was bleak and things were heading south.
Economy stagnating all across Europe & rest of developed world. There was wide spread discontentment against the bankers and banking society in general and they were vilified for having caused the issues in the first place . Housing prices struggled to rise and new home ownerships slumped across the developed world.
Bankers took a pounding from the public and many of the so called ' Masters of the Universe' i.e. I Bankers aka Investment bankers were torn apart by legislators and also by general public , this is here to stay and its widely expected that Investment Banks will look at the way they do business and will be clipped of their risk taking abilities by the ensuing legislation's across the Atlantic.
Among notable personality both for their goods and the ills, Kweku Adoboli the UBS rogue trader who cost the firm $2 billion and Oswald Gruebel the firms CEO his position , Jon Corzine , former I banker , a Senator turned CEO bought his firm MF Global to its knees as it filed for bankruptcy and who could not explain the missing funds from client accounts stand tall for their deeds , however Mario Draghi , Christian Lagarde, Angela Merkel and Nicholas Sarkozy all vie for a place in the league of powerful people to shape the future of the financial and economical world .
Hitherto considered panacea for world issues , BRIC Economies had its fair share of problems.
Brazil had the worst ever flooding in Jan , its main stock index Bovespa fell nearly 16% . Russia had to deal with discontentment among its people widespread loss of faith in elections due to rigging , Putin seemed to have lost his edge there & its own stock index The RTS fell by 22% , Poster child India was hammered by a heavy blow with a weakening rupee, inflation seemed to be the buzz word as it once again showed its ugly face and the cost differential, cheap work force with which India had grown so far is now narrowing and there are many competitors in the same scale, India's main index The Sensex has fallen 22%, India was also deeply plagued by political will to pass the Lokpal bill, the 2G scam to name a few . Big Daddy, China had its own share of problems not limited to Economic slowdown but also news about rail disasters and the bad press relating to China's bad IP laws including the one with Siemens , where Chinese Railway systems (CNR) which had received training from Siemens bumped Siemens in bagging the rights to build the Beijing-Shangai high speed rail networks. and its stock index the SSE has fallen by a whopping 26%
The bold prediction by Jim O Neil and fellow Goldman alumni that BRIC economies would be the largest economy by 2050 and will be the engine of growth seems to be fading away. The new economic acronym seem to be CIVETS (Columbia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Turkey & South Africa)
Commodity prices started to tumble in a late slide , gold lost ground but still ended up about 10% year on year , Silver is trading 10% lower while Platinum lost 21% & Palladium fell by 18%
Brazil had the worst ever flooding in Jan , its main stock index Bovespa fell nearly 16% . Russia had to deal with discontentment among its people widespread loss of faith in elections due to rigging , Putin seemed to have lost his edge there & its own stock index The RTS fell by 22% , Poster child India was hammered by a heavy blow with a weakening rupee, inflation seemed to be the buzz word as it once again showed its ugly face and the cost differential, cheap work force with which India had grown so far is now narrowing and there are many competitors in the same scale, India's main index The Sensex has fallen 22%, India was also deeply plagued by political will to pass the Lokpal bill, the 2G scam to name a few . Big Daddy, China had its own share of problems not limited to Economic slowdown but also news about rail disasters and the bad press relating to China's bad IP laws including the one with Siemens , where Chinese Railway systems (CNR) which had received training from Siemens bumped Siemens in bagging the rights to build the Beijing-Shangai high speed rail networks. and its stock index the SSE has fallen by a whopping 26%
The bold prediction by Jim O Neil and fellow Goldman alumni that BRIC economies would be the largest economy by 2050 and will be the engine of growth seems to be fading away. The new economic acronym seem to be CIVETS (Columbia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Turkey & South Africa)
Commodity prices started to tumble in a late slide , gold lost ground but still ended up about 10% year on year , Silver is trading 10% lower while Platinum lost 21% & Palladium fell by 18%
With Economy faltering , it was up to the politicians to seize the opportunity and push forward for reforms , political will was tested severely and in majority of the cases political will failed to stand the test.The Arab spring spread across much of Middle East , It was a unanimous referendum that people were not willing to wait any longer and voted strongly in favour of democracy against dictatorship. The rioting was not limited to Arab world , discontent spread to developed world , as there was rioting and strikes in many parts of Greece, Italy, Spain and also in England pre-dominantly sparked off by economic issues rather than political.
As if wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were not enough , Nato forces this time around were defiant to defeat the brutality of Libyan dictator, Muammar Ghaddafi whose regime had plundered the middle eastern state and virtually handicapping the entire nation. Defeat they did when Muammar Ghadafi was killed in cross fire in middle of the year.
The US played its part too in the killing of much wanted terrorist Osama bin Laden.
Journalism had its Achilles heels in Rupert Murdoch & the News of the International phone hacking scandal , which cropped out of nowhere and made international head lines and shaming the Murdoch empire and journalism as a whole.
During the early part of the year , Nature played its hand too . A massive earthquake measuring 9.1 on the Richter scale triggered a tsunami in east of Japan killing more than 15,000 people and destabilising the countries nuclear reactors.
As things looked bleak , one specific sector was hotting up , it was the technology sector where the battle of the titans had just begun . Amazon surprised everyone by launching their colour e-reader called the Kindle Fire , which got rave reviews. Google kicked off its battle to thwart Facebook by launching its own social networking website called Google+ . Google also entered into the lucrative airline travel search business and is causing furore in the markets. In the mobile front , it was loggerheads with Apple , HTC , Samsung slugging it out with new launches. It was one of the very few sectors that saw actions leading to positive outcome.
The world population reached 7 billion in 2011 and is continuing to grow . There were scores of scientific discoveries , specifically discovery of a earth like planet called Kepler 22-b & hints of Higgs Boson particle in a recent experiment at CERN grabbing headlines in the scientific community.
Not to leave out the entertainment industry , this year has been no exception as there were hundreds of movies released , one of the major competitors to theatre owners seem to be technology companies like Netflix which stream movies into home, this battle continue to be fought in the years to come.
The Airline industry saw the first delivery of much delayed and much anticipated, fuel economic releases from Boeing in the form its 747 Dreamliner airline and ANA (Air Nippon Airways) was the first to take delivery of it and with it Boeing has fired their first salvo in their competition against Airbus and this time Boeing is placing its bets based on Fuel efficiency, with oil prices hitting high , this bet looks like a sound one.
In sports, Sebastian Vettle did the job for Red Bull racing , a clinical drive from start to finish enroute to 2011 championship , India displayed nerve of steel to clinch their second cricket world cup defeating Sri Lanka , Novak Jkovic won three grand slams in 2011 on his way to becoming world number 1 dethroning clay king Rafa Nadal.
We bid adieu to some of the best known faces on earth , Steve Jobs, Dev Anand , Michael Jackson to name a few.
To conclude , we step into 2012, with lot of clouds hanging around and each one threatening to unleash maximum pain to the society , its long been shown that whatever happens, humankind have always found ingenious ways to solve problems and am supremely confident that we will find way around issues this time around.
2012 will be hot , politicians pushing to stave off contagion across Eurozone , Americans would hope to stabilize their economy and take a heavy view on Financial and associated services. Euro 2012, London Olympics will light fireworks in the sporting field , Apple expected to launch Apple ITV, Mini Ipad, Ipad 3 , Google expected to launch the Ice cream Sandwich (aka Android 4) , Facebook's mega IPO said to be largest since the early 90's , 4G roll-out . The amount of activities expected across various segments and sectors are immense and its going to be another busy year.
Having said that and as proven in 2011 , Nature always goes one better than any of us could possibly imagine , with the Mayan calendar predicting cataclysmic damage in 2012 and dawn of the new age . Whether any of the above will be true or not , only time will tell. We can be cautiously optimistic that nature will take its own course and am sure she will prove who the ultimate master of the universe is.
I am Stepping into 2012 with a handful of specific goals , am hoping to pursue each of these goals with rigour.
I wish you and your family a very happy new year , May this new year bring prosperity and happiness.
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