Text 23042, 52 rader
Skriven 2008-11-03 07:52:38 av Robert Bashe (2:2448/44)
  Kommentar till text 23019 av Ward Dossche (2:292/854)
Ärende: Money, Money, Money.
============================
Ward Dossche wrote to Lee Lofaso on Sunday November 02 2008 at 11:07:

WD> If the US economy dives into a severe depression, it will be noticed,
WD> but our economies will not go that deep.

You forgot the [crossed fingers]. And the wildly diverging ideas and projects
of our politicians.

In Germany, our politicians actually want to encourage people to buy new cars
by exempting the new ones for a maximum of two years from the annual road tax.
Now, the road tax even for a large car amounts to no more than maybe EUR 250 a
year, but a new car (NOT a new used car!) is hard to find for anything less
than around EUR 15,000 - and that's one of these motorized roller skates you
need a shoe horn to get into, not a real car. The road tax on something like
that would be max. EUR 60 yearly. So would this "generous" encouragement induce
_you_ to buy a new car?

Most Germans are laughing at their politicians for coming up with something
this stupid.

WD> Problems here are solved without the need of going to war.

If we exempt the Balkans and restrict our vision to the last 60 years. Without
those exemptions, the statement is at least questionable.

WD> Were the US economy however hitting a depression then it will indeed
WD> be bad as there is already a war going on, so its economy cannot be
WD> saved by a war-industry boost.

However, there's no war economy in the States, no buildup like just before
WWII, so we're not really talking about the same thing here as the period from
around 1935-1941 in the States, which presumably helped shorten the Great
Depression in the States.

Luckily, we also have no Mr. Smoot and Mr. Hawley around this time, either, nor
do we have a desperate and nationalistic Germany and Italy, so the present
situation is unlikely to assume catastrophic global dimensions.

However, what is being done about the financial crisis is controversial: I've
already read (in a Spiegel artical by a German economics professor) that the
American bailout package is better designed than the German one, and is
actually being used when needed, whereas the German one stigmatizes individual
banks and is thus not being used unless absolutely unavoidable - and perhaps
too late in time.

So nobody has the answers on this one, and only time will tell who had the
better solutions.

Cheers, Bob

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