If McKinsey advise, do the opposite.

keep to the Fen Causeway

We need to say louder: low growth is caused by empoverished middle classes. It's the lack of wage increases that leads to low growth, not the other way round.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

Doomed, youse guys is clearly doomed, cause you aint got the sophistication to understand how cutting living standards is the path to improved standards of living.

See, its simple: because that McKinsey guy said so, is why. Anyone who knows as much about sex as him, he's gotta be a real wise guy.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

There is a growing inequity in pay in the United States. From 1976 to 2006, the average salary of workers in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution - nearly everybody - rose by only 2.3 percent, to $38,800, tax data show. Among the top 10 percent, average salaries rose 57 percent, to $195,000.

Seriously, those numbers are so beyond insane, so fantastically perverse that we must trumpet them from every hill and every rooftop every day to create change.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

However, the study which is cited is actually already known on ET for longer. Dodo has shown a picture which showed the eroding middle class (and the study is about 10m new people which fall out of the definition). Nobody can really deny that there is happening such a development, especially not the German left. The question is, what would halt or soften it. The DIW thinks, that lower wages and lower taxes for rich people and some other measures will do it. As there has been real wage increases in some branches recently the DIW fears Germany is losing its capability to compete.
Others deny that, because inside the Eurozone Germany is highly competitive, and outside the Eurozone exchange rate is much more important than some percent wage increase or decrease. In the "Zeit"-Blog Herdentrieb, one of the bloggers was betting, that the trade unions of Italy and France would come to Germany this year and striking for higher wages in Germany, because the wage moderation in Germany is partially reason for the strong Euro, which kills their businesses.

z = +/- sqrt[.25 - c] + .5


Der Amerikaner ist die Orchidee unter den Menschen
Volker Pispers

Like a lot of people here, I'm not too impressed by mainstream economists, but the fact that the FT can't tell the difference between average and median, while the WSWS can, is something even I would never have expected.