Challenge: PIIGS Fly

Alright, since everyone is getting bent out of shape. Here's another up and coming acronym, STUPIDs: Spain, Turkey, UK, Portugal, Italy and Dubai. Happy now?
 
Not Italy or Greece, AFAIR, except for individual aspects, but I heard Spain and Portugal with their stupendous growth rate and employment numbers as examples for how to solve East Germany more than once. See, all it takes is deregulate private credit a *teensy* bit more, allow more freedom to developers, and you'd have, like, double the growth rate and half the unemployment. Guaranteed. Trust me, I'm in real estate.

It got pretty annoying.

Actually I doubt anyone would have been using Portugal as an example on how to achieve economic success. Portugal along with Italy have had the lowest rates of economic growth in the past decade. Unlike Spain and Ireland there wasn't a housing bubble in Portugal, prices actually remained flat throughout the decade. Below there's an article of housing prices in Portugal that came out today, the average price of per square metre for a house in Greater Lisbon is €1.362 per sq metre, which is far lower any other Western European capital. It's also only a 0.4% decline from last year. In a suburb of Lisbon it is not uncommon to find a new 2,000 sq metre home with 3 bedrooms, 2 car garage and a swimming pool for under €200,000.

http://dn.sapo.pt/bolsa/interior.aspx?content_id=1481669

Portugal's problems have more to do with the successive Socialist governments running up budget deficits. As late as last year they were planning on spending billions of Euros on a national high-speed rail system and a new airport for Lisbon. They seem to think that they can spend their way out of a recession, even though the past decade has proven them wrong.
 
Easier to swap Belgium for Britain, and use GB as your first G.


Hmm...never thought of Belgium. Don't recall them being involved in the IceSave debacle, but then since they always seems to have problems between the Flemish and the Walloons (which seems to make forming a government harder each year)...yeah, let's go with Belgium.

So BIG PIIGS! - Belgium, Iceland, Great Britain, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain.
 
While I am no sympathiser of the greek administration(they got what they deserved, after decades of rampant borrowing , no real investment in infrastructure and no restructuring of the economy whatsoever , and blatantly falsyfying statistical data regarding the budget), there are things I take exception to . All european countries employed "creative accounting" tactics in order to qualify for the eurozone . It is true that some developed this trend into a very bad habit that Eurostat was at first loath to condemn publicly; to do so would undermine euro's crediblity (the fact that the US dollar ,after the abolition of the gold standard is basically an inflationary currency, supported mainly by the crude oil transanctions is a valid counterargument). When , during the 90's german exports to Greece amounted to 90% of the german exports to Russia(HELLUVA LOT of Miele washing mashines ,Audis, Mercedes but also KMW military hardware )the german administration praised the greek counterpart for its devotion to european ideals and whatnot . The germans have nowadays adopted the stern schoolteacher attitude. What really pisses me off though is the fact that mere days before their collapse, Leeman Bros were rated as AAA by the same accounting savants that now reproach and belittle entire countries.
 
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