Editor's letter - Nowhere is safe anymore.

(From Financial Director)

It's tempting to look at the collapse in Swedish-Swiss engineering group ABB and consider what would have happened if GEC had stuck with engineering and ABB had gone into telecoms. Either way, we have another name to add to the list of companies that have taken serious hits below the waterline.

Forget Enron and WorldCom - we can put them in a category labelled "Very Special Cases Indeed". Think more about Equitable Life, WS Atkins (whose share price was hit by a financial system error), Stagecoach (whose US operations are causing major concern), British Airways (wrong-footed by cheap airlines and booted out of the FTSE-100), MyTravel (three profit warnings and counting), Aberdeen Asset Managers (split-capital investment trust manager), ITV Digital - and every telco that's spent billions on third-generation licences. These companies have been affected by different types of disaster: in some cases one-off hits, in others a chronic collapse in their markets. It's easy to sit on the sidelines and speculate whether any or all of these disasters ...