Friday, October 3, 2008

Interesting comparisons

PM Anders Fogh Rasmussen


It is interesting.

In Australia, the near collapse of the US and thus global market has seen headlines in the past couple of weeks like: ‘Market Crashes!’ In Denmark, we get headlines like: ‘Unhappy morning on stock exchange.’

Hear the difference?

It is possibly just me and the fact that Australia is, these days, pretty much a new state of America, so when the US sneezes, Australia is rushed to casualty. On the other hand, I know, while things aren’t great in the big countries of Europe, they don’t historically act like there’s a coma coming on.

Today, the Prime Minister , Anders Fogh Rasmussen (born on Australia Day, oddly enough) told us all in Denmark we have to work more. I was well prepared to do this, yessir Mr FR, until I read further and he qualified this by saying, ‘to counteract the labour shortage in coming years’. This pleasantly stunned me because I was thinking more along the lines of, ‘to try and hold your jobs and not join the unemployment queue that is likely to grow, possibly in the coming few weeks’.

So if Mr FR is optimistically planning ahead like this, I think I will too ☺

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

There's a big headline on this week's Ingeniøren (weekly newspaper for the engineers) saying that economic crisis won't affect engineers / engineering field.

Relieved? No, I feel rather suspicious with that article actually

NotQuiteDanish said...

You never know, writer. It could be true, depending on what made you suspicious. I still can't quite work out how this country works as well as it does. When you look across the water to Sweden, there's this giant of a country, with a similar wellfare state system, full of natural resources and yet there unemployment rate is much higher than here, where there are, apart from wind power, no natural resources that I'm aware of...

Paula said...

I remember it being called 'mareridt morgen' - has a nice ring to it with the double 'M' play. Yes, I myself dont quite get how Denmark does it and isolates itself from these major world events. Im just glad to be safely enconsed in the Uni for the time being.

I'll just give you the line that Thomas uses when I worry about anything: "You are in Denmark. Whats the worst that could happen?"

(lets just hope thats true- the Danes seem to believe it)

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

@paula: I'd say a lot of things can happen to you when you're in DK

- there's always radical terorrist lurking on your backyard due to the whole Mohammed drawing commotion

- bunch of P's burning cars roaming the city at night

......what else? Tons! After all, DK is like any other country. Nowhere is safe

MoMo 2.0 said...

love the attitude... I think I will adopt that as well...

I would much rather be in DK right now, than the US..that is for sure!