81–90 of 152 posts
Very interesting to see that Norway is the 2nd most productive, but ranks 3rd in fewest hours worked! Makes me feel good about leaving work at four. ;)
Well BBC ran a show last night. And it did show the some reasons why Greece is such trouble today. It turns out people spent like crazy, far beyond their means. Things like electricians driving Porsche's and High End Mercedes cars. All of it imported from Germany. When a nation full of people with government included involves in such spending it is but other wise natural that they price for it later on. The anchor di…
When a market is flooded with easy, cheap money distortions occur. Witness the housing excesses in the U.S. prior to 2008. This is a phenomenon of human nature. Excess credit inevitably leads to too many bad loans.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes that's the documentary, Its a nice one to watch. What I realized about the entire chapter of Greece was that you can't blame the government and corporations for all the problems in the world. Sometimes we as individuals need to step back and think of our own financial future. Reckless spending on our behalf without planning for the future are disastrous. Savings and investments are important for our future. And w…
Two points: 1. I wouldn't think for a second that Michael Portillo is a reasonable unbiased analyst here. 2. How do we prevent individuals from spending recklessly? Seems like government is going to have to play a large part in that story. On (2), it's not an issue of blame, and personally I'm not interested so much in who to 'blame' - we're doing economics, not philosophical ethics. Rather it's an issue about what w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Germany has massive part on it by enforcing such shockingly low borrowing rates across the Eurozone. It completely destroyed countries with immature Real Estate landscapes, countries used to high inflation rates that collectively shot themselves in the foot. Germany and France took no hostages when they were stagnating and failed to meet EU requirements. They gave absolutely no regard to these countries and now they…
Germany 'enforced' the borowing rates? Let's look a few years back. The rating agencies rated all kinds of junk very high. The banks all over the place where very creative with products hiding the risks. When Germany was asking for tighter regulations we were ignored or laughed at. Now the Germans simply demand that the lessons are learned and we see structural reforms - reforms which can not be done by just throwing…
This is not "a few years back" - this clusterfuck has been brewing since year 2000 with the euribor. At that point several countries needed high rates to stop their overheating borrowing and they were given a shower of petrol to stop their fires.
I don't know about Greece, but I grew up in Portugal, and I suspect there are some similarities. People in Portugal "work" long hours. But they also work in a very infective way: long useless meetings, everything requires lengthy social interactions, bizantine bureaucracy, too many managers for too few real workers and so on. There are complex cultural problems that cannot be expressed by such simplistic metrics (and…
I don't know about Greece, but I grew up in Portugal, and I suspect there are some similarities. People in Portugal "work" long hours. But they also work in a very infective way: long useless meetings, everything requires lengthy social interactions, bizantine bureaucracy, too many managers for too few real workers and so on. There are complex cultural problems that cannot be expressed by such simplistic metrics (and…
But that's only going to change when "we" build companies with that culture, no?
Second, the article itself accepts - " because the two labour markets are structured differently, it is actually hard to compare like with like."
That means the headline is pointless as it is contradicted by the sentence above.
Well BBC ran a show last night. And it did show the some reasons why Greece is such trouble today. It turns out people spent like crazy, far beyond their means. Things like electricians driving Porsche's and High End Mercedes cars. All of it imported from Germany. When a nation full of people with government included involves in such spending it is but other wise natural that they price for it later on. The anchor di…
"Its almost like a third world country" If it looks like a third world country, then where did all the money go? Presumably the majority of people aren't driving around in Porsches?