Volume.1.03 (2010, Week 19)

Eventful week
Full of political, economical, financial, commercial and environmental events

The last week is one of the most eventful weeks I have ever seen. Only 2 weeks ago, on 28th April, there was pretty much nothing going on and BBC was reporting pretty much nothing, but about the Gordon Brown's incident with Gillian Duffy, which Brown called 'bigoted'.

However, from the middle of last week, things started changing, it was not only the general election in the UK. Markets around the world crashed last week, having one of the worst days ever on Thursday the 6th, which eventually resulted in the cancellation of trades made between 2pm and 3pm on 296 stocks out of listed 300 stocks on NASDAQ. Even more bizarrely, no-one quite seems to know exactly what happened and what resulted in leading US Stock Indexes to be dropped by almost 10% and then recovering quite magnificently, all within a very short period of time, withing just few minutes.

Euro crashed, hitting 14 months low and markets lost the gains since the year started. The panic continued on Friday, only to vanish on the next trading day-Monday and resulting in the best daily-gain in 14 months. The sudden vanish in the panic was due to EU finance ministers successful and quick decision on Sunday, which created an emergency fund of 750 billion euros to support the deficit ridden EU countries and more importantly to defend the euro and avoiding Lehman Brother-style collapse in the financial markets. 250 billion euros will be guaranteed by the IMF, 60 billion from EU fund and the rest coming from EU governments, largely from Germany and France.

On Monday, another big news hit the headline: Gordon Brown offers his resignation as a leader of Labour Party in public, hence in effect resigning as a Prime Minister. This could lead to a possible coalition between Labour and Liberal Democrats, although they still fall short of the overall majority within the House of Commons, totaling only 315 seats out of required 326 seats to be the overall majority. Hence, they will need support from smaller parties, but that will make the coalition unstable as they will need 2, 3 or even 4 smaller parties' support.

However, as the incumbent cabinet decided they would not choose its new leader until certain agreements have been made with the Lib Dem, it is uncertain who will become the next Prime Minister if the coalition between Labour and Lib Dem goes ahead. David Cameron probably used to hate Gordon Brown, now he must surely be hating him if the coalition goes ahead and David Cameron loses his chance to become the Prime Minister.

One of the top agendas, apart from the economy and budget, on Lib Dem is an electoral reform, which they say will be a condition for any coalition. It seems they will get it, as Conservative Party has offered they will hold a referendum on it and Labour already favours a reform. However, any electoral reform is going to hurt both Labour and Conservative badly, as they will probably never be able to govern by themselves only, especially if Lib Dem favoured proportional system replaces the current first-past-the-post system. The biggest winner will be, without a doubt, Lib Dem, as they will probably be always a part of the coalition in the future, giving them a power they never had.

If those events were not enough, there is a partial closure on the UK airspace due to Icelandic volcano ashes again and to top it off, BA cabin crew announced they will have 20 days strike within the next month. Now surely, people must be thinking to give up on air travel as chaos and uncertainty of their flights seem to be increasing.

Many more events have been happening within the last week, of which any of them may have hit the headlines during normal times, however it seems there is not much room for those events to be on the headline at the moment.