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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Haim R. Branisteanu who wrote (42659)	11/12/2008 7:24:47 AM
From: dybdahl	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 217755

I have no clue about Norway, but they have put all their oil earnings aside, so they have so much money that they're currently trying to help out others, including Iceland. South Sweden, close to Denmark, has lately changed from source of employees for Copenhagen, to lack of workforce. Therefore, it has become increasingly difficult to get additional workforce from Sweden. (The distance from south Sweden to north Sweden is greater than from Florida to Maine) I don't know specifically about northern Germany. It's not an integral part of our labor market, but a lot of Germans have been working in Denmark for quite some time. This is not good for our economy, because the wage money leaves the country, and this is one of the reasons why more local workforce is needed. However, I watched national German television for a large part of the day, and the financial crisis is not dominating, that's for sure. However, federal government is compensating, of course. They planned to remove tax on car purchases for 2 years, but today they reduced that plan so that it is only tax-free until mid-2009. The main news today is a wage negotiation (I don't know the correct English word for that) between a labor union and an employer union, where employees demand 8% and employers offer 2%, and they hope to agree on something today. I think this is 8% wage increase in 4 years or something like that. The financial crisis gets a lot of blame for reduced growth in the future, but it is always used in the context of "future". The general attitude seems to be, that the financial crisis is a technical government thing that most people cannot recognize and cannot relate to. For the Icelandic people, the crisis is very real, because they cannot get money from home, and people are generally very willing to help them out. One Danish businessman gave a sum of money to students from iceland in the city Århus, for instance. Compared with other countries, where people are worried, the contrast is huge.