Business Beyond the Reef

A Wall Street Journal article about theft across the German-Polish border amused me today.  Not that theft is amusing, but their description of the illicit traffic of luxury cars and heavy equipment from west to east as a “new war” tickled my funny bone.  You see, this “trade” in stolen goods has been going on ever since the Berlin Wall collapsed, despite the claims of some that it started with the easing of border controls between Poland and Germany a couple years ago.

Hot property

I worked in Vienna in the late 1990s and tales of rampant car theft were common in the Austrian capital.  My office had a Plymouth Voyager minivan that I drove regularly across the border into Slovakia.  Turned out it wasn’t the only Voyager crossing that particular border.  My security officer cautioned me to always be careful where I parked, making sure it was in a secure location.  Voyagers were in demand, it seemed, by the Ukrainian mafia, which was using them as “troop carriers” back east.  In one two-week period, 25 Voyagers were stolen off the streets of Vienna and some were later spotted in Kiev.  A van belonging to the American ambassador in Austria was stolen after it was parked on the street in Bratislava.

It wasn’t just the Ukrainian mafia.  Bratislava in those days was divided into spheres of influence controlled by the local Slovak mafia and interlopers from the Ukraine, Poland, Hungary and Italy (and probably others I never heard about).  They each used a hotel in their part of the city as a headquarters and, if you parked in that hotel’s garage, you were pretty much assured protection.  Ironically, I think my van was usually protected by the Ukrainians.

Things worked differently if you had an expensive or rare personal vehicle.  I drove a BMW roadster in Austria and made an early decision never to drive it to the east, though I did make nervous exceptions for brief excursions into Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovenia.  The Albanian mafia was especially active in thefts of BMWs, Mercedes and the like, though the Poles did a good business in stolen cars to the north of us.  The local wags in Vienna swore that the official Albanian tourism slogan was: “Visit Albania.  Your car is waiting for you!”.  In fact, cars stolen from Austria and Italy could be found in huge impromptu “lots” on Albanian beaches and owners sometimes found their vehicles and bought them back.

Nope.  The stolen car trade is nothing new.

Things you might find interesting, but I haven’t had the time or inclination to blog about:

• With the world’s focus on asset bubbles, how is it that I didn’t sniff the garlic bubble?  The Financial Times reported last week that the price of garlic has risen 15-fold in Beijing markets since March.  Seems that Chinese farmers (the world’s biggest garlic growers) had reduced acreage in the pungent bulb, but had not anticipated that consumers would think that garlic wards off swine flu.  Hey, it works against vampires and unwanted dates, doesn’t it?  So now there is garlic hoarding in China and schools buying garlic in bulk to serve in school lunches.
• Friends Kathryn and Craig Hall made it into the New York Times last Sunday.  Kathy was my ambassador in Vienna and the boss impressed the wine-making Austrians when she served her own excellent cabernets at Embassy dinners.  The Times article, naturally enough, is about Hall Vineyards in Napa Valley. I just might open a bottle of Hall merlot this evening.
• The Chinese wedding market is not one I follow.  I have been married nearly forty years, so the latest trends  for wedding spending in China are not on my screen.  But that is what the South China Morning Post looked at this week.  Having lived in Taiwan, it did not knock me over that a lot of money is spent on jewelery and that each Chinese bride must have at least two wedding outfits – one Chinese, one Western.  What did make me sit up was the construction boom for small apartments and houses, with purchases by newly weds potentially sopping up 16% of the entire Chinese market for new residential construction.  That’s a lot of work for architects and construction firms, a big market for materials, and a huge opportunity for all the goods that one needs to set up a household.  Of course, much of that will be supplied from Chinese factories, but certainly not all.
• Currency fluctuations are a two-edged sword, each rise or fall in a currency helps some and hurts others.  There was an interesting take on the falling U.S. dollar and the rising Canadian dollar in the New York Times this week.  I don’t follow ice hockey out here in Hawaii, but apparently exchange rates are contributing mightily to the prominence of Canadian teams in the National Hockey League.  I guess I am climatically challenged.  I think I’ll go paddle my outrigger.

Český Krumlov – Driving from Austria into the Czech Republic revealed a stark picture of recession for the first time on this journey. We crossed the border north of Linz bound for Český Krumlov. It wasn’t the proliferation of casinos on the Czech side of the border that caught our attention. This is an agricultural area with low population density, but we were surprised at the immediate difference between the well-groomed Austrian fields and the less-cared-for Czech farms. An even stronger image was the number of prostitutes waiting on the country roads we were driving. In the first five kilometers across the border we must have seen at least three dozen young women (girls, really) in provocative poses at bus stops, by dirt roads, or just by the highway. I’m not sure if this is a comment on the Czech economy, Austrian men, or both.

Cesky Krumlov

Our mood lightened considerably upon pulling into Český Krumlov, a UNESCO World Heritage site, that has been one of our favorite places for years. Truly worth the journey, Český Krumlov is largely unchanged since the 15^th century and boasts a superb castle with dynamite views.  One of our favorite things to buy in Český Krumlov is marvelous reproductions of Renaissance glassware – the sort with bubbles in the glass and rough places for greasy fingers to hold on to.

We left the Czech Republic through an extremely rural area before crossing into Bavaria. This crossing featured few people and no prostitutes.