The function was held on Tuesday at a hotel in Hargeisa, capital of Somalia’s breakaway region of Somaliland, and was arranged by Telsom, a telecoms company that employs all the bridegrooms.

The Horn of Africa region is staunchly Muslim, so the men and women celebrated separately.

The expense of a traditional wedding, especially when economic times are hard, is driving some young Somalis to leave their homeland.

“One of the reasons why the youth migrate is weddings are expensive, and I appeal to the community to simplify marriage by reducing the cost,” Sheikh Mohamed Sheikh Omar Dirir, one of the area’s most prominent religious leaders, told guests.

Hard times lead 21 couples to share wedding

America has always been the dominant player in the oil/gas services field as it had led the way, back in the late 1800s, in oil and later gas exploration and exploitation. Oil services companies do everything that it takes to deliver the product to their clients, the major private and national oil companies. This includes everything from locating deposits, up to 10km under the ground, to drilling to them, to developing the wells and managing production, to transferring the product to refineries and storage facilities. As such, these companies employ an immense amount of technology and industry.

As oil/gas exploration moved to the far corners of the world, it made more sense to move at least some of the manufacturing closer to the international customers. However, the business units, engineering departments and quality personnel were almost all exclusively employed in America. This will be no more.

As with other formerly dominant industries, such as light manufacturing, IT, textiles, etc, a recession was used as the knife to finally do in the workers. IT is a prime example. While outsourcing was a force that was picking up steam throughout the 1990s, it was not until 2003, the year after the tech bubble bust of 2002 (and a short recession) that IT outsourcing finally took off. The companies involved, used the bust to lay off hundreds of thousands of tech workers around the US and Britain, sighting low profits or debt. The public as a whole accepted this, as part of the economic landscape and protest were few, especially with a prospect of the situation turning around. However, shortly after the turn around in the economy, it became very clear that there would be no turn around in the IT employment industry. Not only were companies outsourcing everything they could, under the cover of the recession, they had shipped in tens of thousands of work visaed workers who were paid on the cheap.

America’s last dominant industry starts to leave

Amid fears that the downturn triggered by the credit crunch has turned into the worst slump in output since the 1930s, data from Washington showed that the havoc wreaked by the problems on Wall Street last Autumn was far worse than originally believed.

American gross domestic product in the final three months of 2008 declined at an annual rate of 6.2%, much weaker than the earlier estimate of a 3.8% fall and ther worst performance by the world’s biggest economy since early 1982.
A breakdown of the data revealed that consumer spending, exports and investment in commercial property were all even lower than originally believed, although the main reason for the downward revision to growth was that the build up of inventories by companies was far less pronounced than originally believed.

Analysts said there had been no let-up in the bad news since the turn of the year and the markets are now braced for payroll figures next Friday to show that around 750,000 jobs were lost in the US during February, with worse to come in future months.

Rob Carnell, economist at ING Financial Markets, said: “Data released so far in the first quarter of 2009 suggest that we are in for another horror story, with new record lows being set in consumer confidence, accelerating declines in the labour market [we may be nearing a million payrolls losses per month before long] and further severe contractions for business investment.” Paul Ashworth of Capital Economics said he did not expect the US economy to begin expanding again until 2010 and even then the recovery was likely to be “muted”.

Meanwhile, there was also grim news from the world’s second biggest economy, with industrial production dropping 10% between December and January and real household spending 5.9% lower last month than it was in January 2008. Exports from Japan have been severely impaired by the retrenchment in the US and much slower levels of growth in China.
Three development institutions – the World Bank, the European Investment Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development today announced a €24.5bn (£22bn) loan programme to help central and eastern Europe, where plunging industrial production and falling currencies have raised concerns that the region will become the scene for the next stage of the global crisis.

The three banks said the two-year plan would provide quick, large-scale financing to banks and ensure smaller companies would not be shut off from capital, but the markets – which believe a much bigger package will be necessary to prevent economic collapse – greeted the plan coolly. The Hungarian government will tell an EU summit on Sunday that the money from the World Bank, the EIB and the EBRD needs to be multiplied 10 times for central Europe alone.
Under the development bank plan, the EBRD will provide up to €6bn euros this year and next to the region’s financial sector, which will include trade finance through banks.

The EIB said it will lend €11bn to businesses in central, eastern and southern Europe, of which €5.7bn is ready to be disbursed, and a further €2.8bn should be approved by the end of April.

The Washington-based World Bank said it intends to propose lending and political risk guarantees of up to €7.5bn for banks, infrastructure projects and trade financing. Its president Robert Zoellick said earlier this week that $120bn (£84bn) could be needed to recapitalise Eastern Europe’s banking system, which has seen the large sums invested by Western banks during the boom years disappear during the credit crunch.

“It (the €24.5bn package) sounds like a lot of money, but when (commercial) banks have lent Eastern Europe about 1.7 trillion dollars, 25 billion is peanuts,” said Nigel Rendell, emerging markets strategist at Royal Bank of Canada in London.
“Ultimately we will have to get a much bigger package and a coordinated response from the IMF, the European Union and maybe the G7.”

US economy shrinks at worst pace in 25 years