Tag Archives: Berlin

The crisis is over, let’s save even more!

October 29, 2010 By in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Heconomy Tags: , , , , , , , 5 Comments

In case you hadn’t noticed, German psychology is different than other kinds of folks’ psychology (volks-psychology?). At least when it comes to saving money it is.

Whereas Americans, let’s say, save the little that they can when times are hard and then toss it out with both fists like crazy people the first chance they get, Germans save when the times are hard and then save even more when the times are good again. The spending part gets removed from the calculation here entirely.

And that’s what’s happening now, again. Now that the financial crisis is ancient history and everything is booming here again and unemployment is supposedly under three million and milk and honey are flowing down the streets and into the gutter and all that, private Germans are saving more privately than ever–an average of about 11.5 percent of what they’ve earned this past six months.

And no, they don’t maybe know something that the rest of us don’t know. They’re just hamsters. It’s in their jeans. I mean genes.

“Für die privaten Haushalte zusammen ergibt sich ein Sparvolumen von rund 93 Milliarden Euro.”

PS: I’m thinking now it’s maybe just a big game or something that only the initiated (the Germans themselves) know about. Whoever has saved the most money by the time he or she dies, wins.

Unemployment drops, absenteeism on the rise

October 28, 2010 By in Habitudes Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Is there a connection here?

More and more Germans are calling in sick here all the time these days (for the fourth year running). And for all the wrong reason too. Not like when say, for instance, a cow has ransacked your house or something.

Kontinuierlicher Anstieg seit vier Jahren

Military restructuring?

October 27, 2010 By in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Helplessness Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Ich bin gespannt (I’m dying to know what’ll happen here).

Sure, making the German Bundeswehr more efficient and less bureaucratic sounds like a great idea, at first.

But think it through, people: There are 250,000 troops right now, of which only 10,000 (tops) can ever be deployed at once (not put into real combat situations mind you, not officially anyway, “deployed”). And I’m not joking here with the numbers, by the way.

So what happens when they drop the number of troops down to 180,000? Are we really supposed to believe that once they do the Bundeswehr will “double the number of troops that can be deployed at any one time from 7,000 to 14,000?”

Wer’s glaubt wird selig! (A likely story.)

Saving ain’t what it used to be

October 25, 2010 By in Hard Facts, Heconomy Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

In Germany, I mean. About 16 percent of the German population doesn’t have anything left over to save anymore.

But the rest who do are still pretty good at it–and they are just as conservative about their saving strategies as they have ever been. Some 49 percent of savers save using the good old-fashioned savings account, 35 percent still like the old Bausparvertrag technique (a savings contract with a home building society), 31 percent save using insurance policies and only about 22 percent go for stocks and bonds.

And that all of these numbers added up together give you a number like way higher than 100 percent only goes to show you just how good at saving these Germans really are. Damn. I wish we could do that.

“Lediglich fünf Prozent aller Sparer legen besonderen Wert darauf, dass sie die Finanzprodukte, in die sie investieren, auch vollständig verstehen.”

Export this

October 22, 2010 By in Heconomy Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Tim Geitner surely meant well when he suggested that certain powerful G-20 export nations like Germany might maybe ought to want to cap their trade surpluses and deficits at 4% of GDP.  But well just isn’t good enough when dealing with the Germans (and their money).

German Economy Minister Rainer Brüderle quickly retorted however, warning against “planned economy thinking” and “macro-economic fine-tuning and quantitative target-setting,” whatever that means. “Eat me completely,” in other words.

Die Vereinigten Staaten kritisieren immer wieder den hohen Exportüberschuss von Deutschland und China.

German Bigfoot sighted

October 20, 2010 By in Hustle (Hoax), Hysteria Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

Sort of.

A big black panther-like cat creature–let’s call it Pussyfoot–has been sited several times near Trier recently, leading local officials, among them Mayor Larry Vaughn, desperate not to lose the money that will be brought in by 4th of July tourists, to insist that Chief Brody tell everyone that the girl’s death was actually caused by a motorboat accident and not a Pussyfoot attack, because the thought of a killer black panther in Triers’s forests would drive tourists and who knows who else away for good.

A majority of scientists however, myself included, discount the existence of Pussyfoot, considering it to be a combination of folklore, misidentification and hoax-type stuff instead.
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„Wir prüfen gerade, ob und wie wir das Tier finden können.”

This hurts

October 19, 2010 By in Helplessness Tags: , , , , , , 4 Comments

To read this, I mean. It hurts from laughing too. This is the most pitiful article I’ve ever read on Spiegel Online, and that’s saying a lot–and that despite the fact that the guy at least got the title right: Obama’s Lost Magic.

Take a minute and read what informed, intelligent and sophisticated European journalists have to say when writing about Obama and the United States today. I would expect sixth graders to think this way, but… Whatever.

Now they are calling Obama a “weakling.” But that’s not fair. Naturally Barack Obama reacts in a more mature, adult way than his predecessor, George W. Bush. The problem is simply that Obama is smaller than the promise he made, and tiny in comparison to the hopes an entire nation placed on him in 2008.