What would I put in my 401K or regular investment accounts?

Really, these guys are total fucking morons. Thanks for the number, it’s probably more than those guys I linked to in (46) above made per day.

Did you see the articles this morning which said the EuroZone is out of recession?

Yeah, Germany and France leading the way. Damned union workers again, eh?

SHOCK DOCTRINE.

These assholes are pushing us to accept the shock doctrine in the wake of a financial crisis. It’s the same thing the shock doctrinaires have done elsewhere in the world, propelling the questionable concept of “creative destruction” before them. And now they are doing to us what we’ve done to other countries.

We have a financial crisis, they say, because our system is too generous to workers; that generosity is the problem, not the financial crisis itself.

And we’re supposed to be as uninformed and uneducated as third world workers and accept this blindly?

Jeebus. We have a financial crisis because the real problem is unfettered, unregulated greed which has the balls to call itself a “free market.” When combined with a lack of transparency and corruption within government, you get a financial crisis.

Oh, and when the rest of the world literally buys into this same system, assumes that the financial industry is safe and well-regulated, it’s called globalization.

When the house of cards collapses, the crisis does, too, because of globalization. It had nothing, NOTHING to do with workers’ wages except that recovery will be slow because workers’ wages have collapsed along with their jobs as a result of the financial crisis.

Gawddamnitall but this article really chaps my chops. Freaking stupid piece of crap.

“Yves here. Krugman does Germany an injustice by failing to contest US prejudices about European (particularly German) labor practices. If German labor practices are so terrible, then how was Germany an export powerhouse, able to punch above its weight versus Japan and China, while the US, with our supposedly great advantage of more flexible (and therefore cheaper) labor, has run chronic and large current account deficits? And why is Germany a hotbed of successful entrepreneurial companies, its famed Mittelstand? If Germany was such a terrible place to do business, wouldn’t they have hollowed out manufacturing just as the US has done? Might it be that there are unrecognized pluses of not being able to fire workers at will, that the company and the employees recognize that they are in the same boat, and the company has more reason to invest in its employees (ignore the US nonsense “employees are our asset,” another line from the corporate Ministry of Truth).

A different example. A US colleague was sent to Paris to turn around a medical database business (spanning 11 timezones). She succeeded. Now American managers don’t know how to turn around businesses without firing people, which was not an option for her. I submit that no one is willing to consider that the vaunted US labor market flexibility has produced lower skilled managers, one who resort to the simple expedient of expanding or contracting the workforce (which is actually pretty disruptive and results in the loss of skills and know-how) rather than learning how to manage a business with more foresight and in a more organic fashion because the business is defined to a large degree around its employees.”

Note to EDWARD HADAS, MARTIN HUTCHINSON and ANTONY CURRIE; the biggest whores do not stand on street corners.

Annuities