I suppose the real reason I eventually overcame this phobia was that I finally accepted that the problem wasn’t with the planes; it was with me. I realised it was wrapped up with other anxieties. Only then was I able to get the risk thing into perspective.
It also got better the more I flew. Indeed, there were aspects I started to enjoy, such as being insulated against the world for a few hours, out of reach of the tyranny of the phone or the relentless emails. Somehow, though, I don’t think I’ll be volunteering for a seat on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo.
YEAR OF REVOLUTION
Leading Article
DECEMBER 30 2016
NEW YEAR HAS conventionally been a time of hope, a moment to count blessings and make promises soon to be broken. The arrival of 2017, however, will be greeted not with a sense of release but of trepidation. Do the shocks, setbacks and slaughter of this dying year signal a new cycle of upheaval, an age of anger and anxiety? If so, one might reasonably ask someone in authority to show us the way to the underground bunker.
There have, of course, been other years of spectacular change. 1968 turned out to be a reckoning with the postwar generation. The botched Suez operation and the squashing of the Hungarian revolution in 1956 flagged up Britain’s lack of imperial clout and the western reluctance to confront Soviet power; it was a year in which we had to accept our limitations.
To find the appropriate historical analogy for 2016, to capture its ambiguities and chilling uncertainties, one has to go farther back, to 1848, the Spring of Nations. It was a time when technological change was shaking up the lives of workers, when government was seen to be remote, when nationalists rejected the rule of empires. Revolt was in the air. It was the year when Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto and when a politically inexperienced outsider, Zachary Taylor, became a shortlived president of the United States.
The tumult of 1848 did not last, even if it did sow the seeds of future change. By contrast 2016 is likely to be part of a rolling transformation of political institutions, and of geopolitical shifts. The many cracks opened up in 2016 will widen in 2017. The triggering of Article 50 in March will, despite Theresa May’s advance notice, have a shock effect on the remaining EU members. They will almost certainly initiate attempts to make the union seem more credible and robust than it really is. The Brexit referendum exposed the large number of people who feel that they are no longer needed and sent them in search of tribal certainties and a more pronounced sense of nationhood.
Many EU governments are in denial that similar strains exist in their own societies. How then will the Dutch and the French answer these concerns in their parliamentary and presidential elections in the coming months? The European establishment still believes that the populist wave is an episode of temporary insanity, that with appropriate nods to the unemployed young or by handing out free Interrail cards, the union can return to the norm, that the pendulum will swing back to the old constitutional order and old party allegiances. They are wrong; in 2016 the geography of the centre ground changed fundamentally.
This was the year in which two deep-rooted grievances converged and found expression in a quiet electoral revolution. The first was local: decades of English resentment over the failings and presumptions of the EU, real and imagined, were amplified into a broad rejection of government by elites in favour of a dream of direct control of borders, immigration and legislation. The second was global. The rapid expansion of world trade since the Cold War has brought prosperity, but not to all. It is perceived as having chiefly enriched those “citizens of the world” whom Mrs May gratuitously derided in her Tory conference speech, leaving tens of millions on both sides of the Atlantic feeling ill-served by representative democracy.
The conventional explanation for this anti-globalisation insurgency holds that inequality is on the rise across the developed world. Inequality is in fact falling, at least in Britain and America. The insurgency is also fuelled by anger: a feeling that, eight years on, there has been no proper reckoning for the 2008 crash that wrecked so many blue-collar and middle-class livelihoods.
In Europe, the ancien régime has not surrendered. It pins its hopes on the German elections next autumn. The steadying hand of Angela Merkel, the country’s subtly mixed electoral system and many safeguards, they calculate, will take the steam out of the insurgents. The anti-immigrant Alternative for Deutschland may notch up as much as 15 per cent of the vote but will stay out of government, a minority party among many. Similarly, many in the EU count on the British parliament removing the sting of Brexit. They are placing bets too on the Trump administration taking in the expertise and careful instincts of consensual Republicans.
This amounts to little more than a game of blind man’s bluff. It ignores the engine of change in Europe: the throb of anxiety about immigration and the assimilation of newcomers. The tragedy of Aleppo and Syria more widely will propel more refugees towards Europe. The chronic misgovernment of sub-Saharan Africa will dispatch many more thousands towards the people-smugglers of disintegrating Libya.
None of these problems was solved in 2016. A breakdown in the migration deal between Turkey and the EU would ensure that the migrant exodus would again reach the dizzying heights of 2015. This will keep the revolutionary fires burning. As long as there is no coherent way of defending the EU’s external borders, its members will operate as if in a state of emergency.
The EU promised prosperity and security to its citizens; it offered less of both to Europeans in 2016. The combination of a banking and a political crisis in Italy could well translate into an existential crisis for the single currency. Meanwhile, the unresolved wars in Ukraine and Syria, both of which have given free rein to the military adventurism of Vladimir Putin, are likely to make the EU less safe. Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th-century chronicler of revolution and democracy, presaged some of today’s complacency: “It is an amazing thing, the exclusive feel of security in which all those tenants of the highest and middle storeys of the social edifice were living when the revolution broke out.”
Britain will have to find new ways of anchoring its safety and its wealth. The relationship with the new US administration will need to be more transactional, less sentimental; one in which we agree to a division of labour, a common approach or, if the president decides to make a de facto ally out of Mr Putin, one where we are ready to criticise and speak out openly for the values of liberal democracy.
2016 wrongfooted pundits, pollsters and betting parlours yet it would be wrong to write it off as a chaotic interlude, or a uniquely polarising historical moment. It has ushered in a period of transformation in Britain, Europe, the US and perhaps even in the Middle East. Britons are being forced to look into a mirror, discover new strengths, revive a spirit of outward-looking enterprise. It will be a bracing rather than comfortable new year, but none the worse for it.
THE NHS IS IN NEED OF EMERGENCY TREATMENT
Janice Turner
JANUARY 7 2017
WHAT IS AN emergency? It is a question I’ve wrestled with lately, as my mother’s illness coincided with a tough new NHS edict that only those with “life-threatening” conditions should turn to A&E. Ours was a very ordinary medical odyssey yet it made me fear that our crisis-stricken primary care system is a self-inflicted mess.
On Boxing Day my 93-year-old Yorkshire mother, who is visiting London, falls ill. It is a bank holiday so I call Seldoc, the out-of-hours service. A doctor is sent, a chest infection diagnosed, and antibiotics prescribed that disagree with her spectacularly. So two days later I call 111 and a random phone doctor tells her to stop taking them.
A day later she is no worse, has no fever, is breathing fine, eating a little. But I’m worried: she’s weak and very old. Is she getting better? Does she need different pills? I’ve no idea. I call my GP surgery: could a doctor visit? The big-hearted receptionist laughs. They won’t even register her as a temporary patient — so much for NHS tourism — and even
if she was their patient they never do home visits. Take her to a walk-in clinic, she says. (But it’s freezing and she can barely walk.) Or call an ambulance.
Now here lies the dilemma. Is my mother an emergency? My instinct is that she just needs a doctor to check her chest, write a prescription, then more bed-rest. Every ambulance call costs the NHS £300: it seems a stupid waste. So I ring 111 again, which — after a call handler takes me once more through 50 irrelevant questions — suggests I wait until 6.30pm when Seldoc kicks in. It is 10.30am. How crazy that the out-of-hours service is better than normal care!
So, because I am fortunate, I call a private GP. And, eventually, at about 10.30pm a suave Harley Street type pitches up and charges me £160 to say my mother isn’t too bad but I should take her to A&E. Now? Couldn’t we wait until morning? “Well, you could …”, he says, covering his elegant arse from malpractice suits.
And so we bundle her up and drive to A&E and at 4am, after a sleepless night of tests, she is sent home frailer than before …
Why would anyone go to A&E unless they are truly ill? What a fiesta of Hieronymus Bosch tableaux. An obese woman bucks and screams on a trolley; a father chides his vomiting disabled son; an old, bald woman with dementia paces the corridor. And yet the patient ahead of us at triage says: “It’s my shoulder, it’s hurt for a few weeks, but it’s worse today.” Wouldn’t you find a hot-water bottle, take ibuprofen — anything but spend a night here?
In 2013, the then NHS England medical director Sir Bruce Keogh declared that the work of an emergency department was “unbounded”, covering problems of “all severities”. Come one, come all. It was a licence for those with poorly shoulders, sore throats, even (reportedly) broken fingernails to turn up at A&E. And for surgeries like mine to dump its more costly, time-consuming duties on another health budget: home visits are at a GP’s discretion. Now, overwhelmed with patients, the NHS struggles to reverse the Keogh doctrine amid budget cuts and an Amazon Prime I-want-it-now culture.
Anyway, three days later my ma got dressed, came downstairs, instructed me to book her return home, drank coffee with her grandson — and collapsed. She was unconscious for 15 minutes: I thought she was dying in my arms. Now she really was an emergency.
For 12 hours I sat with her playing A&E snakes and ladders, repeating her story to ten people, slowly moving up from nurse to registrar. I had time to reflect that it is nuts how ambulance crews must stay with patients until they’re booked in, even if that means hanging around for four hours. No bloody wonder emergency call times are so long! In extremis, I learnt, a nurse may be put in charge so that crews can leave, but then there may not be enough spare trolleys for every ambulance.
I watched the drunks. “Hello, Manuel,” said a weary nurse to a burly, staggering man flanked by police officers. Could Manuel be held in a side ward? The nurse protested, then gave in. Three in ten A&E admissions are alcohol-related and they are messy, troublesome and often violent. The police are reluctant to arrest the drunk and disorderly in case they get ill in custody, so take them straight to A&E. Drinkers treat 999 like an Uber app, careless with their safety, knowing they’ll be scooped from the gutter. Why not create drunk tanks, overseen by nurses and alcohol counsellors, where they can dry out and pay a hefty medical bill to be released?
After 12 hours the registrar said that my mother had merely fainted and could be discharged. He prescribed antibiotics, the very drugs to which she’d had the bad reaction. She had scaled the A&E ladders only to be thrown down a snake. If she collapsed again tomorrow she would be back at the start. So I insisted she be admitted for observation overnight.
My ma was livid with me: her generation are deferential to doctors. And true, I’m no medic, administrator or health minister. But even I can spot an illogical system held together with dedication and gaffer tape. Why can’t GP surgeries — as doctors have suggested — be put in A&E to filter off the poorly-shoulder brigade? Why can’t Seldoc perform home visits for vulnerable patients at all times, if GP surgeries won’t oblige? Most of us know what “emergency” means: it’s the muddled NHS that can’t decide.
THE HEDGIE WITH A 99.9% SUCCESS RATE
Harry Wilson
JANUARY 10 2017
AS DARKNESS FELL on the Sydney skyline on New Year’s Eve, a 43-year-old Czech billionaire stood barefoot in a yellow polo top and black shorts, an arm extended out towards a party in progress just below his terrace.
With a crop of blond hair and a fresh rash of stubble, Karel Janecek does not look like a typical billionaire hedge fund manager in the post on his Twitter account. Indeed, little about the demeanour of the maths-genius-turned-financial-programmer would hint at the central role he has played in financial markets for more than a decade, in which RSJ, the firm he founded 23 years ago in Plzen, the home of pilsner beer, has become one of the biggest players.
Even in the Square Mile, RSJ is barely known, despite being one of the most influential firms in London financial markets. On a daily basis RSJ makes markets in thousands of financial products and is one of the leading, if not the biggest, traders of short sterling and long gilt futures contracts, meaning it has a crucial role in determining the price of products at the heart of the British financial system.
Even more extraordinary is just how quickly RSJ has gained such dominance. Within two years of placing its first derivatives trade on Liffe, now called ICE Futures Europe, in 2002 the firm became the biggest player on the exchange and 15 years on remains the one to beat, turning Mr Janecek into the Czech Republic’s first self-made billionaire.
Mr Janecek, who owns about 40 per cent of the company according to official documents, has made so much money from RSJ that he retired a couple of years ago to focus on pet projects, such as rooting out corruption in the Czech government and promoting his idea for “democracy 2.1”, which involves using computerised voting to make the electoral system more efficient.
Explaining his ambitions to students three years ago, he said: “People who are constrained by living expenses cannot do everything and I wanted to have full freedom to be able to decide what I wanted to do … and with the success, with the money, finally came the thought: ‘What is the most important thing to do next?’”
Three years ago Bloomberg reported that the Prague-based business traded products worth a notional $106 trillion on an annual basis. To put that figure in context, each week this firm, employing about 30 traders, buys and sells contracts worth roughly the same as the annual output of Italy.
Despite its size, and there is a good case for arguing that RSJ is larger than American rivals such as Virtu, Citadel and Jump Trading, it is nearly six years since anything has been written about the firm in the mainstream press.
RSJ’s size has given it a direct hand in helping to shape the regulation of the markets it trades on. When in 2007 the then NYSE-Liffe proposed a new formula for allotting orders, RSJ lobbied against the move. The firm claimed to be responsible for one in ten trades on the exchange, giving it a considerable voice in its running.
On Eurex, the Deutsche Börse-owned derivatives exchange, Bronislav Kandrik, chief trader at RSJ and one of its ten shareholders, is a member of its council that meets to discuss how it is run. RSJ is thought to be one of the biggest traders on the Frankfurt-based exchange.
In a barren year for hedge funds, RSJ’s in-house proprietary algorithmic investment fund, the heart of its sophisticated high-frequency trading systems, made a return of more than 90 per cent.
Whatever shocked the markets last year, RSJ’s money machine ploughed on regardless. Six days after the Brexit vote, RSJ Prop reported a net asset value per share of €791, up 5.5 per cent month on month, according to a filing with the Mauritius Stock Exchange, where the fund is listed. Donald Trump’s shock election victory had no impact and RSJ reported a net asset value of €1,096 per share at the end of November, a rise of 7 per cent on October.
In the three years since RSJ Prop shares were listed, the fund’s NAV has
risen by 2,632 per cent. A spokesman for RSJ said that the three-year figure might overstate the performance because of changes in the number of underlying shares in the fund as investors withdrew money.
Even taking these withdrawals into account, the returns are astounding. To put RSJ’s performance in context, the average managed futures hedge fund lost its investors 1.5 per cent of their money last year, while macro funds eked out an average return of 1.2 per cent. Even Renaissance Technologies’ Medallion fund, regarded by many as the best algorithmic trader in the world, was on course to achieve a return of just over 20 per cent for 2016.
The size of the fund is not known and the spokesman for RSJ said that the firm did not provide information about its assets under management. However, with a minimum investment of $100,000 and a sophisticated understanding of financial markets a prerequisite to joining, this is a fund that excludes all but the wealthiest and savviest of investors.
Indeed, RSJ Prop’s performance is not monitored by any of the leading hedge fund index trackers, meaning it is unlikely that the fund attracts many investors outside the firm’s immediate circle of present and former staff.
Although it has generally flown below the radar of most market-watchers, RSJ’s success and influence have attracted criticism. Four years ago Bart Chilton, then a commissioner of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the regulator that led the Libor-rigging investigation, warned how little the authorities knew about RSJ. “We couldn’t get their books and records if we thought they did something untoward … I mean, they are from Czechoslovakia [sic], they’re going to flip us the bird. They couldn’t care less what we want,” Mr Chilton said.
His concerns apply as much in the UK. Mr Janecek’s website boasts that RSJ, from which he has largely withdrawn from day-to-day business, is “the biggest trader on the London derivatives market”. However, the firm operates in the UK through its Czech financial passport, meaning that none of its staff have to be verified by the Bank of England or the Financial Conduct Authority.
The Times Companion to 2017 Page 13