Bear Stearns warns against airline stocks due to 'imminent' bird flu
Investment bank Bear Stearns has advised investors to start dumping airline and retail stocks in favour of blue-chip utilities as a hedge against bird flu, warning that a full human pandemic of the H5N1 virus could set off the worst global stock market crash since the 1930s.
In the first detailed study of its kind, the US bank suggests buying Scottish Power, biotech companies such as Amgen and Medimmune, and the US health group St Jude Medical Inc, citing them as the sort of companies that would hold up well or even rise in the first phase of a pandemic.
Any stock slide would most likely be followed quickly by a V-shaped recovery, creating a rare chance to snap up shares at super-cheap prices.
I was translating and transcribing for a recent story on the WHO head of epidemiology for China. Very dapper gent, very well-spoken; it's amazing how he never used the words "fucked," "doomed," "futile," or "apocalypse," yet managed to convey them with little vocal nuances and facial tics.
Also, from the blog Imagethief: How to write a generic China bird flu story.
How many years post-9/11 do we have to be before it's a rare chance?
excellent.
st. jude mainly make cardiology related hardware.
I'm sure pacemakers are a potent cure of bird flu.
Roughly 0.000000016666666666666666666666666666667 percent of the world's population has already died from this horrible disease. And if the health systems and cleanliness of countries such as Azerbaijan, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Iraq, Thailand, Turkey and Vietnam aren't enough to stop this virus, what chance do we stand?
Sorry, I can't answer your question, we're all dead from SARS here in Canada.
As an exercise in media analysis, try to find an article that's upstream from the telegraph.uk one or actually from Bear Stearns that talks about this. You can't. I think this story was probably a plant from a biotech company wanting an uptick.
Why do you need bird flu as an excuse to dump airline stocks? They are all tanking now due to oil being continuously over $60/barrel.