Road trip

Going to the Motor City this weekend to meet up with Tony.  The occasion is the NAMES (North America Model Engineering Society) show where he sells books to the (proudly) technologically literate.  You could start an interesting country with the skills represented at this show.

Some video from last year's gathering.



Posts will resume next week.

Statistical Snapshot of the Murder of the Middle Class

A contributor to ZeroHedge goes through the numbers to show that The Housing Bubble Broke The Middle Class, by destroying one half the net worth of the American middle class. Other important items:

Wages now account for the lowest percentage (51%) of total personal income since the government first began keeping the statistics. Since the crash of 2008, the amount of total personal income coming from direct government transfer payments has zoomed from a historical average of 12.5% to 18.3%.

. . . 70% of the increase in personal income was simply money borrowed by the Federal government (recall the $1.6 trillion annual Federal deficit) and distributed to the citizenry. In other words, people aren't making more money--the Central State is simply borrowing more and it's being counted as "income" when it's distributed.

This amply shows the utter bankruptcy of present U.S. policies. Rather than borrowing money to keep millions of Americans barely living at the edge of subsistence, our government could be using its sovereign powers to create money, and use it to pay millions of Americans put back to work repairing America's broken infrastructure (the American Society of Civil Engineers calculates $2.2 trillion is required just to get our already existing infrastructure back into fully usable condition. No money borrowed, and the new money created is going directly into creating new wealth for the country.

So here's the reality: over one-fourth of all households are at or below the poverty line: 28 million.

The top 10%--10.5 million households--own the vast majority of the financial assets ($45 trillion)(the total owned by non-profits is not broken out).

The next 10% own 10% of this wealth, or about $4 trillion. So the top 21 million households own 93% of all financial wealth.

The Great Middle Class between those in poverty and the top 20%--56 million households-- owns about $2.7 trillion in financial wealth, and the millions with mortgages own an additional $1 trillion in home equity. That comes to $3.7 trillion, or about 6.5% of the total household net worth.

Read the entire article.

New FDIC Paper on the Resolution of Lehman Brothers

Mike Konczal at Rortybomb has a relatively short summary of a new paper just released by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation explaining how the Dodd-Frank financial reforms - had they been in effect in 2008 - would have allowed the FDIC to dismantle Lehman Brothers and salvage the good parts of the company without any cost to the taxpayers and without blowing up the entire world financial system.

Two points I want to make: first, Konczal's short summary provides a good idea of how devilishly complex modern finance has become. Whether the FDIC report mentions it or not, this means that it is extremely important that financial regulators be highly trained to be able to deal with these complexities, and highly paid to diminish as much as possible the temptation to slide through the revolving door to a lucrative position with the industry they were previously regulating. I think a senior financial regulator should be pulling down at least $1 million a year, while being subject to extremely strict, almost onerous, ethical codes and security checks. Why? Because we are going to be depending on these regulators to attack and dismantle the most powerful oligarchical faction that now (mis)rules America, and the rest of the world.

Second, the disastrous results of the (mis)rule by the financial oligarchy can be seen by merely scanning the headlines immediately below on the developing world food crisis, which is almost entirely caused by global misallocations of credit and money to predatory financial activities instead of to productive economic investments in industry, agriculture, mining, transportation, infrastructure, and social programs such as education and welfare. What is singularly missing from Konczal's summary, and I assume the FDIC report, is an understanding that a world past the brink of peak oil and global climate change can no longer afford to have six or seven trillion dollars in hot money every day sloshing around the globe in a search of the "highest investment return." Credit and money are creations of society through the agency of government - even if created by private companies, those companies are created and exist at the sufferance of societies and their governments. If credit and money are being misused, then the physical capacity of society to sustain and support human life eventually erodes until the crisis point of widespread penury and starvation is reached, as evidenced in the stories below. If we took just one day of the world's hot money flows - six or seven trillion dollars - what wonders could be created and deployed to make the world's agriculture not only fully adequate, but entirely sustainable?

Until we get to the point where we apply the normative judgment "Does this help society be more economically productive and fair?" rigorously and ruthlessly to every aspect of our monetary and financial affairs, recurring economic crises are inevitable. We don't need trillions of dollars a day in what are essentially gambling bets on interest rates or currency fluctuations. We need trillions of dollars a day flowing through the hands of scientists, engineers, and producers seeking to solve our urgent real problems such as sustainable energy and food production and distribution.

The New FDIC Paper on the Resolution of Lehman Brothers

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Mike

On April 18th, the FDIC released a paper, The Orderly Liquidation of Lehman Brothers Holdings under the Dodd-Frank Act, which explains how it could have used the resolution authority in Title II of Dodd-Frank to taken down Lehman Brothers with no losses to taxpayers and without collapsing the financial system.

It’s always good to remind ourselves what we want our law to do in terms of failure. Failure is a legal concept, and our laws reflect our values on how we want failure to proceed. We want those who benefit the most from risks to take the largest losses. We want to preserve the ongoing value of the firm if there is any. We want to coordinate the behavior of creditors – so value is based on legal rights, not the speed of action – and ameliorate the hardships caused to debtors and provide a fresh start to the entity.

The bailouts shredded these values – those who took the biggest risks also got huge upsides. Creditors were rewarded in all kinds of ways that were unfair. The firms weren’t stripped down to the core ongoing value but instead left with all kinds of bad zombie debts that needed to be recapitalized through earnings and squeezing consumers. We need better laws capable of handling failures of things we hadn’t traditionally expected to fail in a spectacular way, and the FDIC is arguing that Dodd-Frank gets us a lot of the way there. How does it do that?

Read more.

Food prices!

Great list of trouble spots associated with rising food prices.

If Food Prices Keep Surging, These Economies Will Be The Next To Crumble

Mamta Badkar | Apr. 26, 2011, 12:07 PM 

Global food prices jumped 30% year-on-year in February. Food inflation has been pushed by a drop in global food reserves, brought on by severe weather conditions in Russia, China and Australia.

If prices continue to rise by 30% this year, another 193 million people will be forced into poverty, according to a new report from the Asian Development Bank.

We've compiled a list of countries that would be hit the hardest by a 30% rise in food prices and the measures they have taken to ease the burden. Some of these countries with deeper structural problems have a harder road ahead of them. more

 

The real possibility of a global food shortage

Growing up in perhaps the most fertile agricultural area on this earth means that the only food problem I have seen up close is the one where farmers struggle to stay solvent because massive production has trashed prices (again.)  Well, last fall the highly unusual happened--a bin-busting harvest combined with high commodity prices.  This meant that global food stocks were in serious trouble.

I posted about food shortages in late February.  As the spring planting season comes around again, it looks like the food problem is getting even more severe.  Even if you do not agree with all 20 on this list, one or two of these indicators is probably enough.

New Platinum Substitutes Could Make Hydrogen Fuel Cells, Electric Cars More Affordable

Two things to note about the article linked to below. First, there appear to be new breakthroughs in using a substitute for platinum in electric fuel cells. Platinum is unbelievably expensive, and its cost is the major reason why vehicles using fuel cells are expected to cost over $50,000 each. Not having to use platinum will bring the cost of electric cars down to the same price level, or even lower, as cars with internal combustion engines.

Second, note that these breakthroughs come out of the public sector - the Department of Energy, and Case Reserve University. This entirely coheres with how the U.S. economy has historically developed: with the government playing a crucial role in developing and incubating new technologies until they are ready for wide-spread commercial use which allows private profitability: a partnership between the public and private sectors to promote the general welfare through technological improvements which feed economic growth.

"Sir, you are going to have to leave the room."

What happens when you stand up to a panel of "respected" economists and propose to tax Wall Street's financial transactions?

"Sir, you are going to have to leave the room."

The deficit hawks will kill us

On February 28, I wrote a piece I am particularly proud of called Oil prices on the rise--inflationary or deflationary?  In it, I argue that while oil prices WANT to be inflationary, inflation cannot break out unless incomes rise.  Therefore expensive oil will almost certainly lead to deflation.  For years I have pegged Whitney as an inflation hawk so I am delighted to see he essentially agrees with me these days.

Elevator Speech #7--inventing a sustainable future

Invention is hard.  That great inventor Thomas Edison is supposed to have said "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" and he may have been off by several orders of magnitude.  

When it comes to inventing a sustainable future, the inspiration part is pretty easy.  It is clear we must figure out a way to power our societies with the energy we can capture from the sun and live our lives so we produce no waste--toxic or otherwise.  So while the inspiration for building a green future falls into the "well, DUH!" category, actually pulling this off is so insanely difficult, we have mostly put off even thinking about it here in USA for the last 35 years.

Contrary to the picture of some lone genius achieving a spectacular breakthrough while armed with nothing but pure motives, green technology can only evolve out of the best methods already in existence.  Sustainable technology is by its very definition, a superior technology to what we already have.  Those working at technology's leading edge have a HUGE advantage in producing the next generation of improvements.

There are no primitive solutions to the technological problems that already exist.  There are no back-to-nature solutions—do you think our forebears worried about their waste products? or using up all the premium resources? or?  Well we have to worry about these things and romantic dreaming will never produce more than 1% of a solution for living gracefully in our crowded biosphere.  The rest is just organized hard work.

The EPIC fail of the economics "profession"

One of the things I discovered doing the research for Elegant Technology was that the economics "profession" had become almost irredeemably goofy.  As someone who had fallen in love with economic thinking by reading The New Industrial State or The Worldly Philosophers, the discovery that ECONOMICS had fallen into the hands of people who were at best delusional depressed the hell out of me.

There have been many reasons offered for why the economics business wandered off into the tall grass including the notions that economists are just guys with little dicks who hate the rest of the world, or that they have been hopelessly corrupted by their patrons in the FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) businesses.  I have several dozen institutional reasons including the fact that to get ahead in USA economics, one simply MUST do a tour of duty with a Federal Reserve Bank or another central bank internationally--don't want anyone wandering off THAT reservation, ya know.

But if I had to point to the main intellectual flaw in economics as it is currently practiced, I would have to say it is the arrogant assumption that human behavior can be mathematically modeled.  The primary reason I believe this is so is because I was there when it became hip to be a math nerd in the economics departments.

Another conservative myth bites the dust: medical tourism

From Dan Crawford at Angry Bear:

Medical Tourism, separating facts from fiction

One of the greatest myths that I hear on a somewhat regular basis, centers around the belief that the US must have one of the greatest health systems in the world, because everyone comes here for their care. Well, let’s examine that shall we?

As with many things, reality is a little different from the mythology.

According to the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions and Health-tourism.com, there will be roughly 561,000 inbound medical tourists to the United States by 2017….Conversely, 750,000 Americans traveled to foreign countries in 2007, and this grew to between 1.1 and 1.3 million outbound tourists in 2008. Spending on healthcare in foreign countries was estimated to be 20 billion dollars in 2008.

Estimates for growth demonstrate a consistent 35% growth in outbound medical tourism annually. Projections indicate that roughly 1.6-2.5 million Americans will travel abroad in 2012, and spending could reach 100 billion dollars. That’s right, 100 billion US dollars being spent in foreign countries for healthcare such as elective surgeries, complicated dental surgery, plastic surgery, and even coronary bypass surgery.

Read more.

The Fundamental Criminality of the U.S. Financial System

Last night I pointed to former savings and loan fraud prosecutor Bill Black's extraordinary article , Fiat Justitia Ruat Caelum (Let Justice be Done, Though the Heavens Fall), but it is so important I want to link to it again. And here's a few paragraphs to whet your appetite:

U.S. Military Unable to Find Domestic Manufacturers for Many Items

Yet more evidence of the collapse of the U.S. industrial base.

Michael Mandel, the chief economist for BusinessWeek, was recently doing some research for a textbook he’s revising when he stumbled upon a surprising entry in the Federal Registry. On March 21, the U.S. Air Force waived the “Buy American” provision of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 for a construction project at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska. As workers tried to build a few stimulus-backed housing units, it became apparent that a number of simple domestic items couldn’t be procured from American manufacturers – namely, ceiling fans, shower rods, towel racks, toilet-paper holders, and all manner of screws and fixtures.

According to the registry entry, a contracting official

has determined that the above items of manufactured goods are not produced in the United States in sufficient and reasonably available quantities and of a satisfactory quality. The domestic nonavailability determination for these products is based on extensive market research and thorough investigation of the domestic manufacturing landscape. This research identified that these products are manufactured almost exclusively in China.

In fiscal year 2009, more than 44,000 waivers of federal “Buy American” provisions were granted, worth nearly $14 billion.

Read more.

The Corruption of American Christianity - and Resulting Destuction of Capitalism

One of the most infuriating characteristics of American conservatives is their attempt to claim they are "christian." Conservatives' faith in "free market" economics directly contradicts the most basic tenets of christian thought and teachings. Simply put, American conservatives are trying to worship both god and mammon. This is especially evident when one considers the popularity among conservatives of the narcissistic ideas of Ayn Rand. As a DailyKos diarist pointed out today, Ayn Rand explicitly rejected the Christian concept of the sacrifice of Christ.

Elevator Speech #6--Education--what folks must know

In spite of the fact that I spent nearly 20 years inside of classrooms, I don't even claim to understand what schools are trying to accomplish.  I have this notion that folks attend school to learn things but in truth, I learned almost nothing from my formal education.  

Part of this was a function of geography--K-11 was whatever a tiny town on the Minnesota or North Dakota prairies could afford and often that wasn't much.  Part was religious--my father thought it was a splendid idea to send his children to a school run by Mennonites K-6 as cultural enrichment.  It was an interesting cross-cultural experience all right--the kind you never really recover from.

But I spent my senior year in one of those luxo Minnesota High Schools and discovered there really were teachers that hadn't just graduated from college or that libraries could have more than 500 books, etc.  It was just enough to make me believe that school could be something other than an endurance contest with crushing boredom.  

College was at a mega-university that resembled an intellectual smorgasbord with an infinity of choices, but between too much work to feed myself and too much anger at the complicity of some of the big-name professors in the "design" of such lovely war crimes as the Phoenix program, I probably missed those moments when someone actually explained something that was important to know.

Fortunately, this is Minnesota.  Remember that wonderful Matt Damon line in Good Will Hunting where he tells the Harvard prick that someday the prick will discover that he paid "$150,000 for an education he could have gotten at the public library for $1.50 in late fees?"  Well, our public libraries are so well organized, they render bogus any claims that someone has a valid excuse for ignorance.

Damon is right--you CAN get a Harvard education down at the public library (or on the Internet) if you have a bit of curiosity and a well-honed set of skills at soaking up the contents of a good book.  And usually it's better than the Harvard experience because when you read on your own, you typically read only one or two books at a time.  In college, you may read five books for four classes per semester. (20)  Obviously, one cannot explore in much depth with that much simultaneous competition for brainpower.  (Every once in a while, someone will tell me they read Veblen in college.  I have yet to meet anyone who actually absorbed any Veblen in college--including me!)

So in spite of considerable effort and expense we find that schools are not an especially good place to learn anything.  There are exceptions--usually associated with degrees that most resemble old-fashioned apprenticeships like medicine or engineering.  But the schools most of us attend are usually underfunded and poorly staffed--although in fairness, their graduates are usually no more ignorant than those from the luxo schools that are primarily designed to inculcate a proper respect for money and what it can buy.

Since we are mostly on our own when it comes to education and our learning depends on our own initiative, it becomes critically important to understand why anyone wants an education in the first place.  This is especially true for those of us who reject the notion than a degree should be an indicator of status.  So here's what I have learned is important to know.

Reading is still the biggie.  It's the ultimate intellectual shortcut--in a few hours you can read a book that may have taken the author a lifetime of learning to write and when you are done, you know roughly as much about the subject as the author.  If you can extract good information from books (and now the internet) it doesn't make a bit of difference how poor you were or how crappy your schools because you can still find out the important stuff on your own.  Even better, reading is self-reinforcing--the more you read the better you get at it.

Writing is still important but these days, other methods for getting an idea from your head to another's should be learned as well.  These include illustrations, charts, schematics, and video production.

Knowing basic math is essential to understanding your surroundings.  This does NOT mean you are a failure if you never quite understand calculus.  But you should know the difference between a million, a billion, and a trillion, how to calculate and understand percentages, how statistical sampling works, and the rest of the skills one must have to extract meaning from news, government documents, and campaign literature.

Knowing history is critical.  If you don't know history, you must think that that world was mostly complete (transportation, buildings, governments, etc.) the day you were born.  This is the perfect prescription for infantile thinking.  Worse, if you don't know how the world got the way it did, it is impossible to understand your point in human development.  If you don't know where you come from, you cannot know who you are--and if you don't know who you are, you cannot know where you are going.  Historical illiteracy leads to personal aimlessness--every time.

There is a Predator lie that claims that "educated" people don't have to understand tools.  And while everyone doesn't have to operate tools on a daily basis to understand the lessons that technological gracefulness teach, it is also true that people who never learn to use tools and in fact, look down with disdain on those who do, are usually confused about very basic issues.  Not surprisingly, technological illiterates cannot contribute much to a discussion of technology-based issues like Peak Oil or climate change.

So if you must educate yourself for sociological or geographical reasons, concentrate on history, arithmetic, the use of tools, the ability to learn and extract meaning from your surroundings, and the ability to communicate what you have learned with your fellow humans.

Ireland--another poster child for neoliberalism's failures

Neoliberalism is truly a form of insanity because it keeps getting tried in spite of its awesome track record of failure.  A FEW people make out like bandits so I guess it can be argued that neoliberalism isn't a TOTAL failure but as the revolutionary reaction to it builds from Tunisia to Madison Wisconsin, even those few must wonder if their days are numbered.

In the following clips, Max Kaiser views the wreckage caused by neoliberal madness in Ireland.  It isn't pretty but the descriptions of the problems seem especially accurate and poignant coming from those Irish who have seen the future of their country destroyed by incompetence and naked greed.

Update: Real Finns make stunning election gains

The Euro has been generally popular in Finland since its introduction.  While the economic benefits have been questionable, there is strong sense that using the Euro gave Finland membership in a very exclusive club.  The Finns have rarely been invited to the best clubs even in Finland for most of her history--those have been operated by her Swedish and Russian colonial masters.  So flattered by being admitted to the Euro, Finland has been one of its most diligent supporters.

The fact that a right-wing populist threatens to upset Finland's cozy relationship to the Euro is probably very upsetting to the educated and respectable Finns.  Timo Soini and his Real Finns are a real embarrassment to them.  (BTW, my sources in Finland say "True Finns" is a bad translation.  They say Real Finns is much closer to the original meaning.  So I will use Real Finns even though others may still use True Finns.)  And they have reason to worry.  Soini has the potential to do serious damage to the whole idea of the Euro.  From Helsingin Sanomat

Elevator Speech #5--Believing in magic and the new dark ages

The real economy cannot operate on magic.  

My grandfather had a colorfully weird bachelor-farmer brother who loved to entertain us kids with his collection of aphorisms that passed for wisdom in his life. "Everything comes to him who waits--especially poverty," he once told my sister in all seriousness.  His big advice to me was, "There is only one thing you really must know in life and that is this: if you want a harvest in the fall, you must plant in the spring."

It is absolutely impossible to overstate the importance of that basic Producer truth. In a world where the Predators have elevated the "market" to iconic status, it is important that SOMEONE still understands all the steps it takes to actually get something to that market.  Within that simple and blindingly obvious Producer truth are the seeds of civilization itself.

Unfortunately, the Leisure Classes reject this Producer truth--starting with the rejection of the possibility or even the existence of Producer truth.  And because they believe in a world where nothing can be known, they turn to infinite manifestations of magic to describe their lives.  Some magical beliefs are relatively harmless--such as about 99% of all religious practice including the modern "New Age" practices.  

But some "magical" incantations are utterly lethal.  There are hundreds of them but the three most dangerous are:

• Only the market can determine value
• Effective society-wide planning is impossible because it impinges on the freedoms of those perfect markets
• It is possible to have compound growth in a finite biosphere

One of the ironies of industrialization is that, over time, fewer people need to understand Producer truth.  If 2% of the population can grow all the food and 18% can accomplish all the manufacturing, that leaves 80% of the population quite able to indulge themselves in as many beliefs in magic as they can afford.  To fill this market, the range of magic output is stunning and now includes education and government.

When 80% of the population must devote their lives to trading in bullshit that has only the slightest link to anything a sane person would call reality, it is hardly an exaggeration to declare the coming of a new Dark Ages.  Given this reality, can the teabaggers or Fox News or post-structuralism come as a surprise?  Remove the gravity of Producer truth and the world becomes a place where one magical thought is as valid as another.

Of course, the biggest concern with a population trained to believe in magic is that the major problems like the end of the Age of Petroleum or climate change, the ones we would wish away if we could, are precisely the sorts of dilemmas that can only be solved by folks who have left their beliefs in magic behind.

News on renewable energy

One of the prime hazards of speaking out for renewable energy is that invariably, some well-meaning soul will come up after the speech to explain how someone (totally unknown) has invented a process using (unspecified) methods that allow folks to produce a reliable stream of electricity using nothing more than rainwater (or whatever.)  Then I am asked if I have ever heard of such a product (usually no) and doesn't the existence of this product prove the bright green future we all want is just around the corner?

Not wanting to discourage such people but at the same time, wanting them to have a better way to evaluate such a claim, I have over the years figured out the following response.  "No," I will say, "I have never heard of the product you are describing, but I have a rule for evaluating claims for new technologies.  I will only take such products and claims seriously when I can buy one down at Home Depot."

So it is with some amount of joy that I saw the other day that you can now buy solar panels at Costco.

The Confederates have fired on Fort Sumpter

As the nation remembers the 150th anniversary of the beginning of hostilities between the North and South, debates about the Civil War are breaking out again.  I am left out of the best of these debates because most of my friends know much more about the Civil War than I.  For all my interest in history, I have never mustered much interest this particular outbreak of madness.  There are many reasons for this but three stand out:

• All wars tend to all look alike after a while.  The details of this one are not very interesting because the Civil War changed so little for such a short time.  The differences between slavery and Jim Crow, for example, are not great.
• The world we live in and the one we must fix is the industrial outcome of the discovery of oil.  While the Civil War didn't change all that much, the age of petroleum changed EVERYTHING.  I find myself spending 99.9% of my energy trying to understand the world created by liquid fuels and as little time as possible trying to judge whether Pennsylvania was more enlightened and virtuous than Virginia.
• My ancestors didn't arrive in USA until the 1880s.  My people aren't exactly newcomers but the conflicts they experienced were bankers and land speculators vs. farmers or robber barons vs. steelworkers.  The Civil War was not their fight.

Tony, on the other hand, knows about as much Civil War history as I don't know.  He's been working on me.  And he has come up with a debating point that is quite compelling.  (I paraphrase here)

If you do not believe that the Southern aristocracy was an evil influence so extreme, it had to be put down in armed conflict consider this: When the USA didn't have to deal with the backwardness of the South after they left the government in 1861, all sorts of good things got accomplished including land-grant colleges (1862) and the beginnings of the transcontinental railroad (1863).  Now that our southern brethren are (sort of) back in the fold, they have resumed their role as a cultural drag.  From Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats to Nixon's "Southern Strategy" to their right-wing Democratic governor-turned-presidents Jimmy Carter and Clinton, to Newt Gingrich and Phil Gramm as "intellectuals", Southern cultural backwardness still defines this country.

The most interesting policy innovation that occurred as a result of the Progressive opening that happened during the Civil War has to be Abe Lincoln's Greenbacks--easily the most enlightened monetary policy in the nation's history.  When the Greenbacks went out of circulation in 1873, it created an economic catastrophe out here in the heartland.  Trust me on this--my forebears WERE interested in this subject.

In the days when folks still foolishly assumed that our new black president would have to represent Northern Progressivism, Ellen Brown wrote this optimistic letter explaining the genius of Lincoln's Greenbacks.

Finland and the Euro-zone debt crises

I certainly do not claim to be an expert on Finland.  Compared to the typical citizen of USA who is lucky to know that "sauna" is a Finnish word however, my credentials to describe that most obscure of the Nordic countries are solid.  In 1989, a draft of what would become Elegant Technology was published in Finland as Tuottajat ja Saalistajat.  My Finnish publisher tried its best to make my book as famous as possible and I got to meet a lot of highly intelligent and informed examples of their culture.

Getting to know a culture through her intelligentsia may not be the best way to understand that culture but it most certainly is a good way.  And one I had open to me.  And this is what I discovered about Finland.

Finland has certainly been subjected to the neoliberal trends that caused the current global debt crises.  Example--a man I knew who was a member of the Communist Party and could defend the teachings of Marx as a university student in the 1970s was writing a book on Adam Smith in 2005.  But neoliberal trendiness aside, Finland has a long history of treating debt VERY seriously.  Finland has the distinction of being the only country on the planet to pay off her WW I-era debt and when the Soviet Union demanded reparations to remain independent after WW II, the women of the country melted down their wedding rings to help meet the payments.  This is NOT a culture predisposed to be frivolous about debt.

The Finns are also incredibly hard-working in a country that has only water, rocks, and trees as natural resources and clings to an existence at the edge of nowhere.  For example, when the borders moved at the end of WW II, Finland found itself swamped with at least 400,000 refugees from Soviet Karelia.  Because of the economic crises, Finland needed to harvest some of her forests but could not afford chain saws.  So many of those Karelian refugees were put to work cutting pulpwood with axes.

So there you have it--a country with the world's best schools and a work ethic that a good Protestant would find positively erotic, harboring a hatred of debt that burns like a 1000 suns and guess what, the Finns do not have the debt problems of a Greece or Spain.  But this doesn't get them off the hook because they drank enough of the kool aid to convert to the Euro in 1999.  So instead of being forced to reduce their living standards because of debt, they are being forced to lower their living standards to pay for the bailouts of others in debt--mostly because they have accumulated enough wealth to attract the attention of the banksters.

Not surprisingly, folks are PISSED!