Taking Stock: Heatwaves, Pensions and Tech Turbulence

**Will Bain** (0:03)
Hello, I'm Will Bain, welcome to Business Daily. And this week, we're taking stock on a week, or maybe we should say reflecting. Oh no, shh, don't say reflecting.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:12)
It's green, I think it's dirty. Green with algae floating on top.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:16)
Right now, it's like a murky greenish white blue color.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:20)
But it's beautiful, I love it, I love it.

**SPEAKER_5** (0:23)
I think it's a disgrace.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:24)
I think it's fantastic.

**SPEAKER_5** (0:26)
On a scale of one to 10, I'd give it an eight and a half.

**Will Bain** (0:29)
Pool problems at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington DC. Carsten, it's the scourge of weekend gardeners everywhere with their ponds, right? Algae in the sun.

**Carsten Brzeski** (0:39)
I saw a picture on social media, you know, it had a banner somewhere over in a US highway saying that we can't even win against algae. So it's indeed a nice theme.

**Will Bain** (0:51)
No, I've ever seen these kind of algae problems before, or the paint job too, which seems to be another issue there in DC.

**Nga Pham** (0:56)
Yeah, that's a very, very famous, very common problem actually in Hanoi, because we have two big lakes in Hanoi. It turns so green every summer. Yeah. And when I was growing up, they used to send lots of workers just to jump in the lakes to clean them. And I think they have more sophisticated methods, like using chemicals and stuff.

**Will Bain** (1:17)
Well, maybe that's the answer for Mr. Trump and the team at the White House to get it clean this time around. That's the voice of Nga Pham, journalist in Hanoi, Vietnam. As she mentions, joining us today, alongside Carsten Brzeski from the multinational bank ING, joining us from Frankfurt in Germany.
Let's get into the week then. And it feels like one story has kind of been the talk of it, hasn't it, in many parts of the world.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:39)
Oh, it's awful. It is absolutely awful.

**Will Bain** (1:41)
It's unbearable. You cannot breathe. You've got your head turning. You sweat all the time.

**SPEAKER_8** (1:46)
I think we're going to shut early tomorrow. If it gets too hot, we'll be able to shut actually, because sometimes you just can't take it. It's too hot.

**Will Bain** (1:54)
The heat, Carsten. We've had record temperatures here in Europe. Now, I know you've had them in Asia as well. It's not just a weather thing. Carsten, I'm looking at Le Monde, the French newspaper here, saying steel impacts from previous heat waves, 1.5% on sort of productivity because of the hit to lots of people's working conditions. Serious kind of economic impact to this, as well as it being perhaps just uncomfortable for people.

**Carsten Brzeski** (2:15)
No, obviously, I think maybe the 1.5% is more for the French people. Just kidding. No, it's obvious. Productivity will go down in all of Europe, clearly, though it might bring people back to the office as they're sweating at home without air conditioning. I think that's one thing. But also remember, Will, that in the past, we even saw if this lasts for too long, we saw that the highways were literally melting away, so that the infrastructure will also suffer again, whether it's railways which can't stand the heat, highways, bridges. And then the final thing is like, I saw this this morning because you might remember, I'm a passionate rower and I'm rowing in Frankfurt on the mine, there's also transportation waterways, and there hardly are any vessels anymore, and that has nothing to do with the Strait of Hormuz, that has to do with the very low water levels. So we're now also seeing that there will be again, supply chain disruptions as the vessels can no longer pass the mine and the Rhine River.

**Will Bain** (3:08)
No, is it a similar picture in Vietnam?

**Nga Pham** (3:10)
In Vietnam, we're kind of used to the heat, but you're right, it's very excessive heat at the moment, it feels like 46 degrees today. The main thing for us now is power cuts, because electricity consumption jumps something like 15% and is overwhelmed.

**Will Bain** (3:25)
So that's people putting their AC on and things like that.

**Nga Pham** (3:28)
That's right. If I remember right, the late Lee Kuan Yew said that the aircon is the greatest invention of all time, but aircons can't cope with this heat, so we suffer from it. And hospitals actually getting really, really crowded with sick people. So I think it is a major impact on the society and economy.

**Will Bain** (3:47)
And we've seen this, Carsten, too, haven't we? In Europe, France again, somewhere where they've had rolling kind of power cuts in the west of the country too, that those infrastructure systems, not just the sort of physical transport ones you were talking about, but also power so key to how all of the modern economy works now and getting enough of it also having an impact.