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Japanese “new economy” fails … because of rain!

Albert Zenkoff

Sometimes it is just hard to believe news. Reuters reports that the Japanese government seriously blames the weather for the failing economy. To this, the only response I have is “you must be joking”. But, no, they are serious. The Economics Minister Akira Amari announced that “heavy rain has probably pushed the GDP down by 1.6 percentage points on an annualised basis in July-September“.

What kind of economy is it that can lose 1.6% because of rain? Mind you, the rain happens every year in Japan, it’s sub-tropical. Anyway, this only looks like a feeble “it’s not my fault” outcry from a naughty child. Instead of accepting the fact that the “abenomics” is destroying the economy and causing the country to fail, it is, of course, much easier to blame the weather for the absence of the much touted economic growth due to the so-called “stimulation”.

The article notes that “some economists worry that declines in real wages are the bigger factor behind weak consumption” and I am glad to see that at least some see the situation for what it is. Next, we will see failing consumer confidence and after that – the government will …
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Mitigating risks … is a waste of money?

Albert Zenkoff 1 Comment

There was an interesting talk at one of the panels at the RSA Conference, where SilverSky and Adobe claimed that investing in security is a waste of money. Their message is simple and compelling:

“For most companies it’s going to be far cheaper and serve their customers a lot better if they don’t do anything [about security bugs] until something happens. You’re better off waiting for the market to pressure on you to do it.”

Although they say that this was all in pretense, we all know it was not, companies large and small try to avoid fixing problems as long as they can, waiting for customers to complain loud before ever doing anything. Basically, this is a risk that companies rate as unimportant because of its low perceived rate of occurrence.

The problem with this kind of risks that they cannot be properly rated. The probability of these risks is hard to rate because the data is basically unavailable. And the impact of the risk is underrated because of low perceived probability. People tend to ignore such risks.

But the companies, can they also afford to ignore such risks? What has to be considered is that a …
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