Economic road kill: Telecom rodent goes way of Spot

[UPDATE: China's wheels are beginning to fall off. -- UPDATE ENDS]
A string of financial bad news today underscores the world-wide trends are negative and just getting worse. NBR:

New Zealand is staring down the barrel of another five quarters of recession on the back of low private spending and weak export figures.
[...]
JP Morgan analysts are picking GDP growth of just 0.2% for the 2009 year – down from 0.4% in 2008.
Recovery is not expected until the 2010 financial year, where GDP growth is projected to be around 2.4%.

RNZ reporting a credit agency has downgraded the outlook for our currency. The Finance Minister:

We have inherited an economy in recession, a large current account deficit, and sharply deteriorating government finances.
"These are the most challenging economic conditions a New Zealand government has had to face in a long time."
Standard and Poor's today affirmed its AA+ foreign currency and AAA local currency long-term debt ratings for New Zealand. The outlook for the foreign currency rating was revised to negative from stable.

NZIER:
Indicators of domestic trading activity in QSBO suggest that real GDP declined again in the
December 2008 quarter, implying negative economic growth over all of 2008. Real GDP and
domestic trading activity tend to move together over time. On a seasonally adjusted basis a net1
44% of firms reported a drop in their own activity in the December 2008 quarter, which is the
worst result for this indicator since at least 1970.

NZ Herald:
NZ Super fund's figures issued yesterday show a fall from a peak of $14.499 billion in August to $11.664 billion at the end of November.[...] lost 5.04 per cent in November after its worst monthly loss of 13.5 per cent in October.
Its total loss from July to November - the first five months of the Government financial year - amounted to 24 per cent.
NBR again:

Ferrit’s demise has been widely predicted, with many seeing the division as an easy target for Telecom chief executive Paul Reynolds as he tries to revive the telco’s performance and flagging stock price.

Ferrit has a chequered history, beginning when Telecom was forced to buy US pornography portal www.ferrit.com in November 2005 after confusion between the two addresses.

It has never turned a profit.

And that's more people out of work, less business turning over and so on. It's probably that the model failed more than an economic downturn (internet traffic estimation chart of ferrit.co.nz shows it had fallen slightly over 2008) because Telecom spent a shit load of money on advertising Ferrit.

Ferrit employs 24 permanent staff and 13 contractors.

The website differs from its much more successful rival Trade Me in that it sold new products from retailers, rather than a mix of new and second-hand goods from retailers and individuals.

Ferrit does not charge retailers to advertise on its website, instead taking a commission from each item a retailer sells. The retailers determine the price of goods they sell on Ferrit.

The online mall started with around 150 retailers in 2005 but this number has since dropped to 90.

And the ads were typically Telecom weren't they? Patronising, smug.. so smug. A reflection of both the ad agency and Telecom itself. Terribly off-putting. Naff to the max. Another shitty Telecom product.

Feel sorry for the Ferrit guy - he had to act like a noddy for these ads and then they go and use the stock bits (without his mouth being visible) so all he gets is voice work - and now that's gone and everywhere he goes for years it will be: "Hey, you're that egg on that Ferrit ad." He was going to be the Briscoes Lady for the internet age... generations would grow up knowing the Ferrit Guy, alas... thank heavens.

And as for the epicentre of the financial-cleansing: Washington Post reporting:

President Bush has presided over the weakest eight-year span for the U.S. economy in decades, according to an analysis of key data [...]
"It's sad to say, but we really went nowhere for almost ten years, after you extract the boost provided by the housing and mortgage boom," said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Economy.com

Negative, negative, negative. Every economic piece of data is a bad story.