A New Zealand frigate patrols past the Ross Ice Shelf in the Southern Ocean in Antarctica.

Tim Lister
CNN Executive Editor

Professor David Vaughan has an infectious enthusiasm, even when he’s issuing dire warnings about the future of Antarctica. That’s where he is right now, at the Rothera Research Station. He’s just returned from a flight to the Wilkins Ice Shelf – which juts out of the western tip of the Continent. It will probably be his last.

An Englishman whose home is among the dreaming spires of Cambridge, where the British Antarctic Survey has its headquarters, Professor Vaughan has been visiting the world’s coldest places for twenty years. He was surprised to find that the Wilkins Ice Shelf, which began disintegrating a decade ago, hasn’t yet disappeared. But he says it’s in its death throes.

Last year, AC360° reported the Survey’s finding that a slice the size of Manhattan had broken off the ice shelf. Vaughan says the whole shelf is now connected to the rest of Antarctica by a strip of ice just a few hundred meters wide. It’s like looking at an hour glass. This huge slab of ice –11,000 square kilometres (the size of Jamaica) – is about to collapse into the sea. Maybe within weeks, maybe later in the year, says Vaughan.

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Tim Lister
CNN Executive Editor

If there was any doubt that somehow the global economy could avoid following US financial institutions into deep crisis, one recent news item may have dispelled it. And it came from Sweden. Volvo disclosed last week that in the third quarter of the year it received a total of 115 orders for its trucks in Europe.

Yes, that's a total of 115 trucks - for all of Europe. The comparable figure for 2007: 41,970 orders.

The American motor industry is hemorrhaging cash and slashing production, but it is clearly not alone. Last week, the Financial Times was able to fill a whole page with gloom from the world’s vehicle makers. Daimler, Fiat and Renault all drastically reduced their profit forecasts for 2009, predicting that even demand in emerging markets like India and Brazil would fall. Renault said it would cut production of cars by 20 per cent in the current quarter and has already idled several plants in France; Peugeot-Citroen planned “massive“ production cuts. Volkswagen fretted that some of its suppliers would go belly-up – unable to secure financing in the midst of the credit crunch. And the elite are not spared: the chief executive of Porsche said there was a “real danger of a conflagration for the whole industry.”
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A broker is seen at the stock exchange in Frankfurt, central Germany, on Friday. Europe's stock markets plunged Friday after Wall Street opened a breathtaking 7 percent lower, below the 8,000 level, but they soon recouped some of those losses when the Dow Jones index made a partial comeback.

Tim Lister
CNN Executive Editor

Word of the Day: schadenfreude (n) the malicious enjoyment of the misfortune of others.

Not a word one often sees in newspapers, least of all in stories about financial markets. But over the last few days, this German conglomeration of ‘harm’ and ‘joy’ has been writ large in European publications as the Great American Bailout has lurched from one drama to another. An upscale alternative to “I told you so”, schadenfreude is most keenly felt in Germany, where banks and industry have a closer, more sustained relationship than their American cousins. The head of one large German bank wrote: “Companies want to have a stable anchor on the finance side” – as opposed to being set adrift presumably. Not even the Finance Minister could contain himself. Peer Steinbrueck told the German legislature: “One thing seems likely to me: the USA will lose its status in the global financial system.” The echo of hands rubbing with glee could just be made out. No wonder the Financial Times’ German edition ran the headline “Schadenfreude stirs in resilient Germany.”

The French have also chimed in. President Nicolas Sarkozy: “The idea that markets are always right was a mad idea....Laissez-faire is finished.” And that from the Frenchman sometimes labeled “l’American” who has gone out of his way to improve relations between Paris and Washington.

Hypocrisy and schadenfreude are often soul-mates. It’s not as though European banks have turned up their noses at the trough of lucrative derivatives and other exotic instruments. Ask the several thousand employees of Swiss Bank UBS who are now ex-employees. And within days of his moralizing at the German parliament, Mr Steinbrueck was throwing together a $40 billion bail-out plan for a big German property bank. As the German magazine Spiegel put it: “No More Cause for Feeling Schadenfreude.”

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