'Y2kWatch News - Information for Education and Preparation
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// Y2k around the world //
Americans are myopic. We think the world revolves around us. Y2k
will be a rude awakening to this arrogant perspective. I was going to
write on this issue for today's post, but someone sent me a very well
written article by Byron Belitsos that did a fine job coving the
topic. No need to reinvent the wheel, but Byron's article is a bit
too long for this forum. I've posted the entire piece at
y2kwatch.com and you'll find the link to the full article after
this excerpt.
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// OVERSEAS Y2K: FACING THE GLOBAL DIMENSION //
By Byron Belitsos
Let's say the current view of mainstream Wall Street analysts is right
and the best-case Y2K scenario comes to pass-the millennium rollover
is virtually a non-event in the U.S. The dreaded day arrives, and
thousands of Y2K remediation projects nationwide are on time, fully
tested, with few residual bugs. Those lone-wolf alarmists--like
Deutsche Morgan Grenfell's chief economist Dr. Edward Yardeni--are now
instantly discredited. Those of us who spent hundreds of dollars
stockpiling goods, or who listened to recommendations to pull out of
the stock market by mid-1999, are walking around feeling rather
sheepish. Our skeptic friends tease us, "I told ya so!"
Rejoice, friends, for we've won the Y2K war! Never mind that total
national spending on remediation surpassed the cost of Vietnam; not to
worry that the $500 billion or so spent on Y2K repairs created no
bottom-line returns. We--the greatest country in the world--we've
absorbed those costs and suffered just a few hours or days of
down-time. The largest computer project ever--"the single most
expensive problem of all time" says The Economist magazine--was
mastered by American ingenuity. Your job and your company's future are
now secure from the frightful bug. And from here on it's smooth
sailing for the global markets into the new millennium, right?
Wrong...
After all the champagne bottles are cleaned up from Times Square,
something quite off the radar screens of Americans (at least as I
write this piece in late February) will occur. Quietly, but
inexorably, there will be thousands, even tens of thousands, of
simultaneous Y2K failures overseas. The trillion or so spent on Y2K
outside the U.S. will not have squashed the bug. At first, these hits
will go unnoticed in the U.S. press; those who discounted domestic Y2K
paranoia--and were proven right--aren't likely to be watching for
Y2K's bite overseas.
And what about you and me? Will we notice, or even care? Well, when's
the last time you, your employer, or your stockbroker worried about
the state of information processing in Italy, or China, or Malaysia?
Or, about arcane questions such as these:
* How are programmers at Telebras, the Brazilian phone company, doing
on its Y2K fix? (It has been described by Merrill Lynch as "woefully
uncompliant." Dr. Yardeni commented that the crash of Brazil's
telephone system "alone could cause a disruption of global
just-in-time production severe enough to trigger a global recession.")
* What's the latest on Y2K remediation in the French nuclear power
industry? (France is heavily dependent on nuclear power and is racing
to complete Y2K remediation in this sector.)
* What's the status of the Y2K fix in Germany, now that the conversion
to the Euro is completed? (Germany is suprisingly far behind, and has
been rated with third-world countries such as Turkey and India.)
* Will Russia be able to deploy its talented pool of programmers this
year to fix at least some of it mission-critical systems? (It's widely
known that Russia is "toast" as far as Y2K is concerned. The
Y2K-induced collapse of parts of its infrastructure will affect Europe
too; for example, Russia provides 40 percent of Germany's power.)
* Will Italy's inefficient beauracracy be able to enforce Y2K
compliance standards in time? (A recent BBC story reports, "The
Italian government did create a panel of unpaid experts, but gave it
no support staff to carry out its recommendations.")
* How goes it with Japan's banks, some of which are now teetering on
collapse? (A key survey showed that Japan's leading 19 banks are
spending about the same on Y2K as Citicorp, just a single American
bank; but remember, Japan's banks are the world's largest.)
In my estimation, such questions will become front and center in
calculating the future of the global economy, the security of your
job, the value of your 401k, or the prospects for your investments or
your small business. For anyone not living in a forest monastery in
Thailand, Y2K's international dimension will soon have to be factored
into their lifestyle. "Overseas Y2K" will join the many better-known
indices of global economic performance, most of which already point to
a global recession. But it also has an upside: As we'll see, the
reality of overseas Y2K binds humanity together in new ways, linking
our common fate more closely than ever before.
I have personally reviewed the literature, and the following
conclusion is getting hard to refute: Outside of the U.S., the UK,
Canada, and Australia, all too many countries are perilously behind in
their Y2K efforts. And these countries' infrastructures-even the
poorer countries such as Turkey-are deeply dependent on aging
information systems that support telecommunications, manufacturing,
transportation, power, and government services. And further, pervasive
Y2K failures overseas will negatively impact U.S. industries that are
highly integrated with the global economy.
---end of excerpt---
For the Full Article go to:
y2kwatch.com
(be sure the whole link is pasted in your browser) If you're having
trouble linking, just go to y2kwatch.com and click on the
Y2kWatch News Archive link in the menu. This article is posted in the
"General Archive" section of my website.
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