A long but interesting read about how one country got out of a debt bubble crisis.
In short, a balanced budget, cutting public sector salaries, and a short term rise in unemployment. The latter a necessary step to re-allocate labour. Continued on Page 47
#1
I took a 10 percent haircut on my salary 3 years ago, as an Estonian public servant, but I don't think you can argue with the results. We're growing at about a 6 percent clip right now, while most of Europe goes backwards.
#2
Interesting. One thing I noticed was the exceptionally high murder rate in Estonia compared to the rest of Europe and even compared to the USA. What is that all about? Is this just a naturally more violent culture?
#7
Estonia first came to my view when I was doing research on firearms related fatalities. Estonia was much higher than the US (we were 12th) and I thought that was odd for a European country. I eventually wrote it off to their high consumption of alcohol.
[Al Ahram] Hundreds of thousands protested in the streets of Spain against latest round of austerity measures imposed by the government
Continued on Page 47
Posted by: Fred ||
07/21/2012 00:00 ||
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#3
The protesters have a point, although they are wrong on several others.
Spain isn't Greece. Public pensions and graft aren't the primary source of the debt crisis there. Over the last decade+, Spain invested in a lot of major prestige public works and banks invested in real estate projects aimed at selling holiday flats to Brits etc. These have been expensive, often incompleted boodoggles and in many cases are underwritten by the public debt that is now overhanging the Spanish economy as a whole.
Austerity measures will cut deeply into lower middle and middle class workers in Spain, while the EU bailouts will protect at least part of the assets of the real estate developers and banks.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
