Like S&P, Germany ITSELF believes that it’s time for “the yet superpower” to start saving big time and pronto. And I for one would listen (you know, like listening to E. F. Hutton when they used to talk?) because the Germans have had a whole lot of experience in giving good advice like this as of late. Just look at how their recommendations have helped Greece, for instance.
“The danger is that the Americans are still lulled into a false sense of security.”
“Möglich, dass Obama dann (nach der Wiederwahl) wirklich anfängt zu sparen.”
It’s specious too. What isn’t counted as savings by Americans are investments, which is where almost all of by retirement savings and investments are. If you had a government bond, even THAT would not be called savings.
Unlike most of europe, Germans actually do invest, but not even to the degree that non-europeans do, who depend almost universally on the state to fund feeding, clothing, and housing them in retirement.
So to say that we don’t save is either ignorant or evasive.
“Möglich, dass Obama dann (nach der Wiederwahl) wirklich anfängt zu sparen.”
actually, people stopeed spending money because they were panicing. So if they want to call that “saving” because it was sitting in the bank, sobeit. The economy genuinely fell crestfallen and fearful on the week of his inaguration, and owed that dip entirely to what his nacent administration’s policy positions. It scared the markets and the entire population that actually goes to the effort to start businesses and save for themselves.
Otherwise: if you expected to live off of the relative largesse of your neighbors, you would have been elated.
The Spiegel writer, rather predictably, is writing from inside his very small heimat-bound bubble.
Yeah, Joe. I also think it’s funny (cute?) that Obama’s reeclection is already a foregone conclusion here. And then that quote: “It’s possible that Obama will THEN begin to really save.” Talk about living in Wayne’s World. Yeah, and maybe it’s possible that monkeys fly out of my butt.*
* For our German readers: It is a figure of speech suggesting something completely impossible (like monkeys flying out of your butt).
Obama will save FOR US? Where do they get this stuff? What does our savings rate have to do with them, besides reduce German exports?
All an Obama re-election will yield is 4 years of national-suicide policies by an ideologue with nothing left to loose.
I know that they are in love with their wishful thinking, but Obama is not a shoe-in, and may never be. A good measure of middle-of-the-road people whom you never hear discuss politics simply detest his presidency, and find most of the people around him creepy, secretive, and invasive. He’s completely incapable of doing International Affairs, and if it weren’t for Bernanke and Geitner, we’d be waiting in bread lines.
The pall that Obama put over the economy the week he was inaugurated is no joke and no exxageration. The bottom truly fell out from under teh economy that week, and unemployment didn’t reall shoot through the roof until that quarter.
If Germans love him, they can have him. That some think him not a native-born American is irrelevant – he’s alien to American culture and society.
I think creepy, secretive and invasive are the nice words for it, Joe. I’m not paranoid or anything (having to say that is pretty creepy too) but I was reading The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper the other day and had to think of our current administration when reading this one passage (Popper is taking about totalitarianism here, I know, but still):
Aestheticism and radicalism must lead us to jettison reason, and so replace it by a desperate hope for political miricles. This irrational attitude which springs from an intoxication with dreams of a beautiful world is what I call Romanticism. It may seek its heavenly city in the past or in the future; it may preach “back to nature” or “forward to a world of love and beauty”; but its appeal is always to our emotions rather than to reason. Even with the best intentions of making heaven on earth it only succeeds in making it a hell–that hell which man alone prepares for his fellow-men.
Observing Hermann 
It’s specious too. What isn’t counted as savings by Americans are investments, which is where almost all of by retirement savings and investments are. If you had a government bond, even THAT would not be called savings.
Unlike most of europe, Germans actually do invest, but not even to the degree that non-europeans do, who depend almost universally on the state to fund feeding, clothing, and housing them in retirement.
So to say that we don’t save is either ignorant or evasive.
“Möglich, dass Obama dann (nach der Wiederwahl) wirklich anfängt zu sparen.”
actually, people stopeed spending money because they were panicing. So if they want to call that “saving” because it was sitting in the bank, sobeit. The economy genuinely fell crestfallen and fearful on the week of his inaguration, and owed that dip entirely to what his nacent administration’s policy positions. It scared the markets and the entire population that actually goes to the effort to start businesses and save for themselves.
Otherwise: if you expected to live off of the relative largesse of your neighbors, you would have been elated.
The Spiegel writer, rather predictably, is writing from inside his very small heimat-bound bubble.
Yeah, Joe. I also think it’s funny (cute?) that Obama’s reeclection is already a foregone conclusion here. And then that quote: “It’s possible that Obama will THEN begin to really save.” Talk about living in Wayne’s World. Yeah, and maybe it’s possible that monkeys fly out of my butt.*
* For our German readers: It is a figure of speech suggesting something completely impossible (like monkeys flying out of your butt).
Obama will save FOR US? Where do they get this stuff? What does our savings rate have to do with them, besides reduce German exports?
All an Obama re-election will yield is 4 years of national-suicide policies by an ideologue with nothing left to loose.
I know that they are in love with their wishful thinking, but Obama is not a shoe-in, and may never be. A good measure of middle-of-the-road people whom you never hear discuss politics simply detest his presidency, and find most of the people around him creepy, secretive, and invasive. He’s completely incapable of doing International Affairs, and if it weren’t for Bernanke and Geitner, we’d be waiting in bread lines.
The pall that Obama put over the economy the week he was inaugurated is no joke and no exxageration. The bottom truly fell out from under teh economy that week, and unemployment didn’t reall shoot through the roof until that quarter.
If Germans love him, they can have him. That some think him not a native-born American is irrelevant – he’s alien to American culture and society.
I think creepy, secretive and invasive are the nice words for it, Joe. I’m not paranoid or anything (having to say that is pretty creepy too) but I was reading The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper the other day and had to think of our current administration when reading this one passage (Popper is taking about totalitarianism here, I know, but still):
Aestheticism and radicalism must lead us to jettison reason, and so replace it by a desperate hope for political miricles. This irrational attitude which springs from an intoxication with dreams of a beautiful world is what I call Romanticism. It may seek its heavenly city in the past or in the future; it may preach “back to nature” or “forward to a world of love and beauty”; but its appeal is always to our emotions rather than to reason. Even with the best intentions of making heaven on earth it only succeeds in making it a hell–that hell which man alone prepares for his fellow-men.
Woah. He nailed it. It should have been required at theRaucherecke… at that school we both know a little bit about.