Der englische Premieminister James Callaghan sagte 1979, als England in von Streiks und ökonomischem Chaos zerrüttet wurde:

“ Well, that's a judgment that you are making. I promise you that if you look at it from outside, and perhaps you're taking rather a parochial view at the moment, I don't think that other people in the world would share the view that there is mounting chaos. ”

Die britische Tageszeitung The Sun fasste das zuammen; besser und kürzer als es Callaghan je gekonnt hätte:

Crisis? What Crisis?

Tja; die die dieses Blog lesen wissen ja, wie schlecht es uns geht, und werden über den Stand des ökonomischen Desasters in regelmäßigen Abständen informiert werden:

Der Deutsche Finanzminister Peer Steinbrück gibt Newsweek ein interview:

It's the yearning for the Great Rescue Plan. It doesn't exist. It doesn't exist! Dealing with an unprecedented crisis is a puzzle, a trial-and-error.

Trottel; der Plan die Welt zu retten existiert; Keynes General Theory aus dem Jahre 1936 ist seit ihrer Publikation allgemein als das Mittel um mit einer Situation wie der, in welcher wir uns befinden umzugehen.

Honestly, I don't know. I tend to be skeptical because it is human nature to see the crisis as even worse than it is.

Ich bin mir sicher die zehntausenden Arbeitslosen, die wir haben übertreiben.

I don't want to downplay anything;

Aber nicht doch.

2009 looks like it will be a very difficult year.

Vor allem für ihm; wie lange noch, bis er arbeitlos wird? 24h tops!!!

But we are not about to collapse.

Jaja, nocheinmal Callaghan:

I don't think that other people in the world would share the view that there is mounting chaos.

Cirsis? What Crisis?

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Aber: Hoffnung is on the way:

Paul Krugman:

December 11, 2008, 5:58 am
The economic consequences of Herr Steinbrueck

There’s an extraordinary — and extraordinarily depressing — interview in Newsweek with Peer Steinbrueck, the Germany finance minister. The world economy is in a terrifying nosedive, visible everywhere. Yet Mr. Steinbrueck is standing firm against any extraordinary fiscal measures, and denounces Gordon Brown for his “crass Keynesianism.”

You might ask why we should care. Germany’s economy is the biggest in Europe, but even so it only accounts for about a fifth of EU GDP, and it’s only about a quarter the size of the US economy. So how much does German intransigence matter?

The answer is that the nature of the crisis, combined with the high degree of European economic integration, gives Germany a special strategic role right now — and Mr. Steinbrueck is therefore doing a remarkable amount of damage.

Here’s the issue: we’re rapidly heading toward a world in which monetary policy has little or no traction: T-bill rates in the US are already zero, and near-zero rate will prevail in the euro zone quite soon. Fiscal policy is all that’s left. But in Europe it’s very hard to do a fiscal expansion unless it’s coordinated.

The reason is that the European economy is so integrated: European countries on average spend around a quarter of their GDP on imports from each other. Since imports tend to rise or fall faster than GDP during a business cycle, this probably means that something like 40 percent of any change in final demand “leaks” across borders within Europe. As a result, the multiplier on fiscal policy within any given European country is much less than the multiplier on a coordinated fiscal expansion. And that in turn means that the tradeoff between deficits and supporting the economy in a time of trouble is much less favorable for any one European country than for Europe as a whole.

It is, in short, a classic example of the kind of situation in which policy coordination is essential — but you won’t get coordination if policymakers in the biggest European economy refuse to go along.

And if Germany prevents an effective European response, this adds significantly to the severity of the global downturn.

In short, there’s a huge multiplier effect at work; unfortunately, what it’s doing is multiplying the impact of the current German government’s boneheadedness.