By Nigel Ryan There are few things, in my experience, more nerve wracking than an investment analyst in a funk. It's not the sudden rush that you might get from, say, waving a red rag in front of a bull. The pawing at the ground, the lowering of the head, the sudden charge, well, its over in minutes and relatively easy to negotiate given the right levels of adrenaline and sufficiently nimble feet. Even in the absence of these there is always the option of nipping over the hedge or of hiding behind a tree. But a financial expert on a bad day, that you can't just side-step with an elegant twirl of your toreador's cape. And when that financial expert is an investment analyst whose bad day began with a twinge of social conscience then you can unfurl the entire contents of your linen cupboard and it will do no good at all. You will remain firmly within his sights. I know this because, several months ago, my attention was drawn by a particularly disgruntled investment analyst to an article that appeared in one of Egypt's most widely circulated dailies. The article in question had been written by the chairman of a company that specialises in the kind of products that come in tetrapaks, those ubiquitous, plasticised paper containers that are, to the best of my knowledge, non-biodegradable, and will therefore constitute one of the late 20th century's greatest legacies to future generations. His company sold milk, in any of its increasing number of varieties, associated dairy products and fruit juices. Now, in a great many economies, such products would be more or less recession proof. But they are economies in which milk is not seen as a luxury good, economies in which families, forced to trim the household budget, can start somewhere else. In Egypt, though, and for a great many families, there is, quite evidently, nowhere left to start. In the absence of statistics, reliable or not, it becomes impossible to hazard a guess at the drop in sales of milk or of pre-packaged fruit juices. But drop there has been, and it must be significant if the chairman of a major company is prepared to put pen to paper to try to buck the trend. And what was his suggestion? What analysis did he produce to grace the pages of one of Egypt's major newspapers? In what could only be described as a fit of pique he recommended, in an admittedly roundabout way, that families that could not really afford to pay for private lessons for their children should not pretend they could. They should abandon private lessons, thus freeing some much needed cash to spend on his company's products. How, asked my investment analyst friend, could such insulting rubbish be published and the question, which on the whole was intended to be rhetorical, carried a barb, the sub-text being you work for a newspaper, so you tell me how. And, of course, I couldn't. Such is the sensitivity of the accused. Beyond these two pages, in this particular English language publication, my editorial opinions are kept strictly to myself. But a clue, I think, can be found on the opinion pages of this edition, in Salama Ahmed Salama's regular column. The people who have ready access to newspapers, who can write in the sure knowledge that what they write will be published, tend to view the world through a quite distinct prism. And the world looks decidedly different from behind the tinted windows of a hugely expensive automobile. That someone whose world view has been formed in such circumstances feels in a position to advise families living on extremely limited incomes just how they ought to allocate their resources really should come as no surprise, nor should it necessarily cause any raising of the eyebrows that the advice proffered should be motivated by personal gain. The article in question appeared on the financial pages of the newspaper which is why a translation had fallen into the hands of my investment analyst friend. Perhaps he was expecting a more coherent piece of financial journalism. He may well have awoken craving a discussion of ways in which it might be possible to ensure that an item as basic as milk should not be subject to quite such elasticity of demand. In which case he was looking in the wrong place. Such fundamental questions seldom get a look in on the pages of the press. When they do appear they appear as sub-texts: it's just a question of reading between the lines, though to do this properly it is best not to lose your temper to the extent that this person lost his. So what, reading between the lines, can we make of the article that caused such annoyance? To begin with, I suppose, one can draw the conclusion that sales of what would once have been considered necessities have fallen, which hints at the impact the current economic downturn is having on ordinary people despite the reassuring noises made by those who would have us believe otherwise. The fact that such an article appeared on the financial pages of any publication gives more than a hint of the general level of economic coverage in the domestic press, the tenor of its discourse, the concerns that can be expressed, and the level of debate. And they confirm that the privileged views, the views that find ready access to the public domain, are the ones held by people who observe the rest of their countrymen from behind tinted glass windows. Their relationship to the lives of those they seek to advise, and to influence, is rather less than tangential. They occupy a parallel universe. And one cannot help but be reminded of poor old Marie Antoinette. No private lessons? Well let them drink unsweetened, pasteurised orange juice instead.
