economics: Germany

The current crisis can only bre seen as "government-made" if one subscribes to your theory that your government's perfectly reasonabvle measures to encourage banks to grant mortgages to selected home owner in low-income neighbourhoods constitute an irresistible temptation to bankers to make ridiculous loans to "ninja" - no income, no job - borrowers.

If you can believe that, you can believe anything.

Only in your upside-down universe, where the banks can do no wrong and a non-republican administration can do no right.

if

They had worked, and had gotten unemployment down from 25% to 9%. In

1937 - in a premature fit of "fiscal responsiblity" the residual stimulus was stopped - too early - and unemployment went back up to 17%.

Palpable nonsense. Since you acknowledge that it has the ability to destroy them you should be able to understand that it also has the capabliity to create them, as Roosevelt's first and second stimulus packages demonstrated.

What expense? Your dearly beloved bankers had arranged that a whole of private jobs had dissappeared at the same time, os there were plenty of people around just itching to be hired.

Except that they were paid for by deficit financing. The non-existent money that had vanished when the bank-generated housing-price bubble burst was replaced by the government borrowing money from investors.

r y

This is the point of view that you espouse. You lack the wit to understand that a serious recession - like the Great Recession of the

1930's - wastes an enormous amount of potential production, as everybody shuts up shop and waits for better economic weather. Keynesian pump-priming prevents this.

According to whose web-site?

says 9.5%. This has to be the "official" figure.

I'm sure that you can find some right-wing nit wit who has counted everybody who isn't actually working - as in sick, retired or getting an education - as unemployed, but it is ratehr difficult to compare their "unemployment" level with historical numbers.

e

And how do you think he is "actively obstructing" the cleanup? The bureaucracy that he inherited from Dubbya was - predictably - less enthusiastic about getting oil companies to spend money on things like back-up blow-out preventers than its equivalents in other countries, and ill-equipped to go after the oil company whose single blow-out preventer didn't do its job, but undoing eight years of institutionalised arse-licking isn't an overnight job.

He was a little faster off the mark that Dubbya after Katrina. BP did seem to underestimate the magnitude of the problem at the beginning, and your environmental service weren't set up to second-guess oil companies, so your 100% hindsight can certainly identify areas where a divine and omniscient president could have done better.

In fact it is precisely Dubbya's tar-baby - Dubbya's election campaigns were funded by oil-money and he always acted as an oil- industry glove-puppet. If Karl Rove were still working for him, one would suspect that the blow-out preventer had been deliberately sabotaged by some rogue Tea Party supporter, to give nitwits like you an exrtra excuse to complain about Obama.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Banks made billions by doing exactly that, with no risk. In fact, they were practically forced to.

Banks, like all real businesses, are in business to make profits.

If you leave bundles of cash in the sidewalk, labeled "free money, help yourself" you'll get lots of takers. When it's gone, don't whine about greed.

Bill Clinton, Barney Frank, Maxine Waters, and that crowd made it happen. Look it up.

John

No, they ship most of them to Europe. These aren't sold in very large quantities over here. I believe they are called Golf Kombi in Germany.

It's stupid. At most of my clients the average age of engineers is well over 40, for good reasons.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.

My Golf and Rabbit were built in Mexico. The drive trains were OK, probably made in Germany, but the body work was flakey, lots of rattles and such, and the door locks were horrible junk. Actually, the Golf did have a couple of transmission problems.

I drive an Audi now, sound mechanics, but the firmware is a nightmare.

The best-quality cars in the world are Japanese, but aren't as fun to drive as German cars.

And

That "creates jobs."

John

Nope, but here's a nice picture for you:

"Ability to destroy" does not imply ability to create. That a teenager can wreck you car proves he can make them? That's dumb.

See graph, above.

That has immediate negative effects that apparently you don't appreciate. It's unhelpful.

You don't understand Keynes. Even Keynes didn't suggest *wasting* money.

Obama's.

The number you cite doesn't count people who've given up--we had

652,000 of those *last month*. (That's why unemployment's "down", the "progress" the President touted last week.) It's the for-dummies number.

Your figure counts scientists mowing lawns part-time or selling newspapers on street corners as "employed."

So, the number of people who want full-time work but can't find it is ~18%. Or maybe 17%--I haven't added it up recently.

You can confirm these and more at the right-wing Obama administration's BLS website. Your link, for starters, and

and

Regulation (EPA, Coast Guard), preventing skimmers, berms, etc. Refusal to waive the Jones Act (minor, but it's easy and free, yet he won't do it.).

You contradict yourself. If you're going to blame Mr. Bush's bureaucracy for the spill, then you can't credit Obama with that same bureaucracy's "swift" response.

But your facts are wrong anyhow, so it doesn't matter.

Bush had National Guard on site in three days. Obama didn't even mention the spill for eight. But, Mr. O has done a swell job ever since. Not.

But, Obama's environmentalist-appointee led the oversight agency, the MMS, BP (a foreign-owned company) was a major Obama contributor and cap-n-trade booster, and Rahm got 5 year's free use of an apartment from BP. So, you might want to stash a few of those inconvenient tidbits under your tinfoil hat... ;-)

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Sad. I haven't heard such complaints from Germans even though theirs were built in Mexiko as well. But I do remember an outsource attempt for a client way back when, where we thought that south of the border would be closer than Asia. We learned our lessons rather quickly and took it to China.

Car + firmware + lot of electronics, not so good. I had a huge Audi station wagon in Germany, very little in electronics. That was always good to me and now at age 23+ it's still going strong. I know the new owner very well.

Yup, got tow JPN cars. Reliable but more run-of-the-mills. The Nissan ZX'es or a Mitsubishi 3000GT ought to be fun though. Or a Kawasaki :-)

Yeah, it does. Over here (seriously).

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.

There's the time factor, too: things take a long time to build, but they can be destroyed essentially instantly. Jobs, businesses, productive infrastructures, even if set free, will take a generation to grow back. The US electorate hasn't that sort of patience, so we get idiotic macroeconomic things like "stimulus", the equivalent of shooting speed into your arm instead of exercizing and eating your broccoli.

John

Neeerp! I had two JPN sport cars a 280Z and a 280ZX... quite fun.

Yep, But now I'm into comfort and luxury _and_ speed :-)

I'm hearing rumors of a 450ZX... that could ring my chime ;-)

Virtually all of my customers are in the same age range as my children... 38 to 48 :-) ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     |
             
Obama: A reincarnation of Nixon, narcissistically posing in
       politically-correct black-face, but with fewer scruples.

I've been thinking about this for decades, and six ways from Sunday for the past year and a half. We *can* fix this, and in less than a generation. Less than a decade, if we have the will.

Just as long as Obama's assault on our institutions don't stand. Those cured, the patient will heal herself. It's part of the synergy, the miracle of our system, of entrepreneurship. We just have to stop him killing it.

If we don't do that, America's lost, the Founder's experiment in freedom over. But even then, after Rome came ... Italy. Lovely ladies & good wine. That ain't *all* bad.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

The worker-guy jobs are the hardest to rebuild. If we buy most of our manufactured stuff from China, and use latino immigrants for cheap off-the-books domestic labor, a lot of American workers won't have jobs.

To some extent this is the globalization problem. But our tax and immigration policies just make it worse.

John

mike

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nd

Couldn't agree more, but there's a lot of stupdiity about.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

en

Only if you follow James Arthur's demented logic. It is true that banks that made bad loans to ninja customers had better-looking numbers than those that restricted themselves to customers who had some chance of eventually repaying the loans, but this is just saying that fraud is profitable, in the short term.

There is always a balance between a firm's short- and long-term interests. The banks generated good short terms figures by making loans that weren't going to be paid back. This isn't a sustainable business model.

It wasn't lying on the sidewalk. The loans had to be documented, and the banks flat out lied about credit status of the people who got the ninja loans. That's active fraud, though nobody seems to have been prosecuted yet.

They put the banks under pressure to ease their blanket ban on home loans for homes in low-income neighbourhoods. The banks weren't prepared to do the extra work required to identify the - limited - number of credit-worthy applicants from low-income neighbourhoods, despite the fact that legislation offered them more money for making such loans, precisely to cover this extra cost, and opted for large- scale fraud.

James Arthur seems to work from the insane premise that banks can do no wrong, and gleefully blames the Democrats for everything that went wrong, despite the fact that there was a Republican administration in power when the banks finally went overboard and made loans to everybody who asked.

I know he is a friend of yours - with a magnificent singing voice - but even you should be able to realise that he lacks any kind of thinking brain.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Now I really don't like Chrysler because I got burned by their products but when I see the new Dodge Challenger, oh man, all I'd have to do is work up a good full-blown midlife crisis and I just might ...

Here it's more like 25 to 70 and I'm not as old as you are :-)

Actually the upper range used to be well above 80 but pancreas cancer ended that client relationship, he's not here anymore :-(

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.

I won't even rent Chrysler products when I travel.

[snip] ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     |
             
Obama: A reincarnation of Nixon, narcissistically posing in
       politically-correct black-face, but with fewer scruples.

[snip]

I forgot to mention, in 1977 I grew a beard and bought a 1977 280Z (new) to salve my impending approach to 40 :-)

Then, in 1983, I got a new 280ZX, thanks to a dumb broad who ran a red light at 18th St and Highland and T-boned me :-(

I kept the beard, but bought our first Q45 in 1996, then another in

2006. ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     |
             
Obama: A reincarnation of Nixon, narcissistically posing in
       politically-correct black-face, but with fewer scruples.

Nope? The graph reiterates what I said - the unemployment figures are year by year figures that smooth out the 9% - and you still think that it constitutes some kind of counter-argument?

The example is even dumber. Governments create and destroy jobs by manipulating the money supply. A single means of control can produce either effect.

Your teenager uses a compleltly different mechanism to wrecks your car than he have to use to make a new one

Which actually reiterates the point I made. By plotting year averages it smooths out the 9% minimum in early 1937 - which was in any event an estimate, not strictly comparable with today's official figures (which you choose to ignore in favour of your own estimates).

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Not as unhelpful as a your preferred total credit squeeze, which didn't work for Hoover, but right-wing nitwits just love traditional solutions even when they don't happen to work.

Nor did I claim he did. Your claim - unsupported by anything except your ideological convictions - is that Obama's first plan "wasted money". You don't say how or where - no doubt assuming that all your readers understand that any activity espoused by a Democratic president is necessarily a waste of money - and the rational reader would like to know.

's

In other words, you can find people in the statistics whom you think ought to be counted as unemployed, and if I went to the trouble of trawling through the statistics and trying to duplicate your anti- Obama mind-set I might be able to recreate your 18% unemployent figure.

Not of figure that tells us much about the current state of the economy, because we can't easily go back and perform the same conjuring trick on earlier statistics

In other words, the 18% comes out of your fertile imagination, lightly constrained by the official numbers. If a republican were in power, your prejudices would work differently.

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So you want him to micro-manage stuff that he doesn't know much about. He'd have to be remarkably stupid to take that kind of risk, and you've got to be remarkably stupid to propose that he should.

I didn't.

Really? Short of reading your mind, I've not got access to deluded opinions that you cite as facts.

Not.

Dubbya may have had the National Guard on site in three days - which is oddly slow since the Florida National Guard should have been in Florida when the hurricane hit - but they didn't do anything useful.

The Deepwater Horizon drill rig caught fire on the April 20, and sank on the April 23, at which point the Coast Guard said that there didn't seem to be an oil leak. They revised their opinion on the following day, estimating some 1000 barrels a day

The estimates have been rising ever since. Eight days after the rig caught fire the estimates had gone up to 5000 barrels a day, and the current figure is now 50,000 barrels a day. If Obama had mentioned the spill any earlier, you'd probably now be going after him for alarmism

Inadequate supervison of off-shore drilling wasn't the only problem Dubbya left behind. Maybe Obama should have made cleaning up that particular mess his first priority, but he didn't - the mess created by your much-loved bankers commanded rather more of his attention.

I'm sure that BP took care to contribute to Obama's campaign as well as to McCains. As a non-US owned oil company I doubt that they expected to get much for their money.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Since businesses were destroyed in large numbers by the Great Depression, when the banks were left free to practice "fiscal responsiblity" by not lending any money to anybody, you should be able to understand that the stimulus wasn't quite as idiotic as no stimulus would have been.

The current situation isn't great, but it certainly isn't a replay of the Great Depression, despite the best efforts of your banking system to recreate that disaster.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

w.

"Thinking"?=A0

You want to use Hoover's technique to cripple your system instead. The Great Dpression didn't actually kill your economy, but it made a much bigger mess than you are facing at the moment.

Your founding fathers' experiment in "freedom" isn't all that impressive. Your constitution is a venerable antique, your voting system elects only candidates that are supported by people with lots of money, and your legislature seems to spend most of its time doing favours for commercial interests.

There are quite a few better constitutions floating around - two hundred-odd years of development has allowed for some improvements to evolve, albeit outside God's only country - and it would seem to be high time that you started another experiment

Pity about the political system. Berlusconi could be a US politician.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen