WHEN Royal Liver Assurance announced its annual trading results on Monday, it took the opportunity to make the claim that people were rediscovering their trust in mutuals, in the midst of the credit crunch.
Mutuals, the firm argued, are more dependable places to put your faith in than banks, which have been greedy and over- ambitious in recent years.
People call mutuals old-fashioned and have predicted their demise for many years now, but there is a lot of virtue in them, too. After all, they have been around for years, plodding along, doing the basic job of investing savers’ money for the long term. It may be old-fashioned, but it works.
This city, and the wider North West region, has a huge tradition of investing through mutuals. Royal Liver is one of the best- known, and although it has moved head office elsewhere now, Liverpool Victoria, or LV, is another example of a big mutual institution with its roots in this area.
It should be remembered that it was often former mutuals that got themselves into the most trouble during the credit crunch, including Bradford & Bingley, Northern Rock and Alliance & Leicester.
Far from being on its last legs, the credit crunch should encourage mutuals to believe they have another generation of investment business ahead of them yet.
I WASN’T sure whether the press release I received yesterday from a human resources consultancy advising businesses to prepare for a possible pandemic by putting in place contingency measures that include working with a skeleton staff was a joke or not.
It didn’t sound a great prognosis.
I don’t claim to be a public health expert, so I can’t offer any opinion about whether or not this flu outbreak will be a global disaster. What I can say is that the most recent scares that we have seen, such as SARS, Avian Flu, the Millennium bug, the 9/11 attacks, etc, have not produced the economic meltdown that many predicted would follow. Instead, it was the bankers who caused the biggest trouble, not dictators, global warming or viral infections.
Yet the stock market has had the jitters about Swine Flu. Businesses such as Honda have banned staff from worldwide business travel. Others won’t let their staff travel to Mexico, which is understandable enough for the present.
But surely this disease will have to develop into something much bigger than it is at the moment before it could start costing the world’s economy the trillions of dollars that some have already suggested. I don’t think its a lot of fuss about nothing, particularly if you are one of its victims in Mexico, but there is little evidence yet that things are going to get bad in this country.
Apart from the multi-nationals placing travel restrictions on their staff, the rest of us are probably more preoccupied by beating the credit crunch.
There are straightforward things that businesses can do to prevent the disease spreading among their staff, as Dr David Gidlow says in our Page Five story in this supplement.
Of course, if it does turn into a pandemic, then firms will be faced with staff reluctant to turn up for work. Some may be able to adapt with home working, but others may just have to shut down for a while, until the problem passes.
