Germany is the world’s #2 exporter, very close behind China. In 2010 it exported a total of 960 billion euro, amounting to 42% of its GDP. Its trade surplus came to 153 billion euro, almost 7% of GDP. Impressive stuff, no doubt, and an achievement that Germans are justly proud of.
But, not all surpluses are created equal… 35 billion of that surplus, a whopping 23%, was accounted by just four countries: Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal. Yes, to a very large extent the PIGSs’ munching at the trough was what kept Germans working in their factories. And if you just add France, another country that is currently screeching towards the borderline of fiscal probity – at least according to financial markets – the numbers get even more interesting. Germany’s PIGS+F trade surplus jumps to 64 billion, a full 42% of Germany’s entire trade surplus. In GDP terms (trade surplus is GDP-additive), PIGS+F surplus accounts for nearly 3% of Germany’s economy.
Germany Plans for Possible Greek Default
The rest of the euro zone is losing patience with Greece. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble is no longer convinced that Athens can be saved from bankruptcy. His experts at the Finance Ministry have been working on scenarios exploring what would happen if Greece left the euro zone. By SPIEGEL Staff.
Herman Van Rompuy is an influential man in Europe. He is already president of the European Council, the assembly of the European Union’s heads of state and government. Soon he will also serve as the chief representative of the euro zone, if all goes according to plan.
Van Rompuy’s new role as “Mr. Euro” is a highly prestigious position. German Chancellor Angela Merkel thinks highly of the unassuming Belgian politician, who conceals a propensity for toughness and efficiency behind his seemingly humble appearance.
People are biased against creative ideas, studies find
The next time your great idea at work elicits silence or eye rolls, you might just pity those co-workers. Fresh research indicates they don’t even know what a creative idea looks like and that creativity, hailed as a positive change agent, actually makes people squirm.
“How is it that people say they want creativity but in reality often reject it?” said Jack Goncalo, ILR School assistant professor of organizational behavior and co-author of research to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science. The paper reports on two 2010 experiments at the University of Pennsylvania involving more than 200 people.
Don Norman: Google doesn’t get people, it sells them
“What is Google? What do they sell?” asks Don Norman, the author of The Design of Everyday Things and a demigod of the design world.
It’s a question that gets asked a lot, especially as the company’s power and products continue to expand. In a talk on Friday at the dConstruct conference in Brighton, England, he pointed out that –despite the complexity of the organization — the answer usually looks pretty simple.
“They have lots of people, lots of servers, they have Android, they have Google Docs, they just bought Motorola. Most people would say ‘we’re the users, and the product is advertising’,” he said. “But in fact the advertisers are the users and you are the product.”
Then he went further. “They say their goal is to gather all the knowledge in the world in one place, but really their goal is to gather all of the people in the world and sell them.”
“Can Intervention Work?” by Rory Stewart and Gerald Knaus Can Intervention Work?
Rory Stewart and Gerald Knaus; Review by Seth Jones:
In his classic “Twenty-Seven Articles,” published in the Arab Bulletin in August 1917, the renowned British Army officer T.E. Lawrence advised beginners to use prudence when working with Arab armies. “Do not try to do too much with your own hands,” he warned. “Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them.”
It was sage advice from a seasoned warrior who traipsed around the Middle East wearing local garb, speaking several Arab dialects and living with Arab irregulars during their struggle against the Ottoman Empire. Since that time, the United States and Europe have engaged in dozens of interventions across the globe, from occupied Germany after World War II to the soft, limestone cave complexes of Afghanistan after 9/11. In some cases, as in Germany and Bosnia, these interventions have achieved impressive results. But in others, as in Somalia in the early 1990s, they have gone gravely awry.
Haven Bound A Q&A with Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir
In 2008, Iceland was hit hard by the global financial crisis. Citizen outrage and political unrest followed, sparking a people-powered shift in government policies. In June of 2010, the parliament passed the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI), a resolution to draft the world’s strongest free speech protections. Then, this spring, the government began crowdsourcing a new constitution online, and produced a draft in late July. Alysia Santo spoke with Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of parliament and a one-time WikiLeaks spokesperson, about her goals to transform Iceland into a haven for freedom of speech and transparency. A condensed version of this conversation appeared in the September/October 2011 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.
You have said that journalists are information refugees.
In this fragile metamorphosis, where most of the media is moving on to the Internet but has not figured out how to make money, it’s all about what gets the most clicks. It’s usually not in-depth or investigative reporting. These types of reporting are very often quite expensive compared to the number of clicks it gets. We’re hoping to make Iceland into a place where if you take the chance to blow the whistle, your story is going to appear.
My driving force is bloggers in countries like China, Tibet, Sri Lanka, and others. They are risking their lives to tell us what’s really going on. I want to be able to provide them safe haven. At the very least we can make sure that their stories remain up no matter what.
How Billionaires Could Save the Country
If you think, as I’ve argued repeatedly, that we need a “radically centrist” third-party presidential candidate to shake things up, and to force both political parties to confront the myriad issues that their interest groups and ideological litmus tests bar them from treating honestly, then there are only two ways for that to happen in 2012. Like it or not, both depend on wealthy Americans investing in creative political change.
The first scenario is that the new group Americans Elect succeeds in securing ballot access in all 50 states and runs a national online nominating convention (in which every registered voter can be a delegate) next summer that will put an independent ticket on the ballot. The group tells me that it is on track to have ballot access in 27 states by the end of this year; by law, the other 23 don’t allow the relevant signature-gathering until next year.
Panorama: The Gordon Lodge Bailey’s Harbor, WI
The Gordon Lodge. Flickr search.
Tap or click to view the full screen panorama.
Brian Clark likes Door County’s eastern shore.
Gilly’s Custard Fond du lac
Worth a stop. Gilly’s website.
Is Homeland Security spending paying off?
On the edge of the Nebraska sand hills is Lake McConaughy, a 22-mile-long reservoir that in summer becomes a magnet for Winnebagos, fishermen and kite sailors. But officials here in Keith County, population 8,370, imagined this scene: An Al Qaeda sleeper cell hitching explosives onto a water-skiing boat and plowing into the dam at the head of the lake.
The federal Department of Homeland Security ago gave the county $42,000 to buy state-of-the-art dive gear, including full-face masks, underwater lights and radios, and a Zodiac boat with side-scan sonar capable of mapping wide areas of the lake floor.
Up on the lonely prairie around Cherry County, population 6,148, got thousands of federal dollars for cattle nose leads, halters and electric prods – in case terrorists decided to mount biological warfare against cows.