10 Lessons from Greece

theEconomicCollapseBlog notes 10 Things That We Can Learn From The Economic Collapse In Greece.

#1. Food Shortages Can Actually Happen

"In Greece, many people are starting to totally run out of food.  Even some government institutions (such as prisons) are now reporting food shortages."

#2. Medicine Is One Of The First Things That Becomes Scarce

"The Panhellenic Association of Pharmacists reports shortages of almost half the country’s 500 most-used medicines."

#3. When An Economy Collapses, So Might The Power Grid

"Greece’s power regulator RAE told Reuters on Friday it was calling an emergency meeting next week to avert a collapse of the debt-stricken country’s electricity and natural gas system. "

From Bloomberg.com

Greece faces the threat of rolling power blackouts as the economic crisis leaves utilities without cash to pay for natural-gas imports and operate power stations.  

#4. You Cannot Take Water For Granted

In America, "Without truck deliveries of purification chemicals, water supply plants will run out of drinkable water in 14 to 28 days."

#5 Your Credit Cards And Debit Cards May Stop Working
  If banks collapse, so do the cards they issue.

#6. Crime, Rioting And Looting

"British electrical retailer Dixons has spent the last few weeks stockpiling security shutters to protect its nearly 100 stores across Greece in case of riot."

#7. Average Citizens Will Start Bartering

 "alternative currencies have already been popping up in Greece."

#8. Suicides Spike

"Suicide statistics in Greece have been absolutely soaring during the last couple of years."

#9. Your Currency May Rapidly Lose Value

"Greeks are pulling their money out of the banks because they are worried that their euros will be turned into drachmas which would rapidly lose value."

#10. The Government Will Not Save You
  In Greece the government is the problem.

What happens when a country runs out of money?

John Donne once wrote, "No man is an island, Entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, A part of the main." What is true of humanity is doubly true for countries, even island nations (metaphorically speaking).

The nation of Greece is a study of what happens when a country cannot pay its bills. And when a majority of the people rely on government benefits and subsidies, the people suffer then the money stops flowing.

According to JohnGaltFla.com

Migrants are being attacked and are desperate to leave the country. Pharmacists are now refusing the government benefits card and demanding cash only for life saving drugs because they fear not being paid in Euros by the Greek bureaucracy, as payments are already many months behind in reimbursements. Sadly, soup lines are the longest since the end of World War II as the middle class has fallen into dire straits of poverty, forcing dumpster diving by parents and children around the nation.

And it is expected to get worse. Greece imports 40% of its total food supply and exporters from other nations no longer trust Greece pay its bills in a timely manner (if ever). Typically in such circumstances Greece would pay on credit or else shipments would be insured against default.

But the lines of credit for many importers in Greece has already been greatly reduced if not outright terminated by many European companies due to the crisis.

And

a more dire blow was struck this week when several major insurers declined to cover shipments of goods into Greece in case there is a default on payment.

Could this happen in America? The US government ignores debt risk and says, we can just print more money. But all countries are part of a larger global economy and if other nations stop trusting a currency or ability to pay, then the country is doomed.

You ate what?

CDC research shows outbreaks linked to imported foods increasing.

Foodborne diseases from imported food appeared to rise in 2009 and 2010, and nearly half of the implicated foods were imported from areas not previously associated with outbreaks.

During the five-year period of 2005-2110, 39 outbreaks and 2,348 illnesses were linked to imported food from 15 countries. 17 of the outbreaks occurred in 2009 and 2010 alone. Overall, fish (17) were the most common source, followed by spices (6) such fresh or dried peppers. Nearly half of the problem foods came from Asia.

As much as 85 percent of the seafood eaten in the United States is imported, and depending on the time of the year, up to 60 percent of fresh produce is imported.

Bottom Line

“As our food supply becomes more global, people are eating foods from all over the world, potentially exposing them to germs from all corners of the world, too,” says the CDC. 

Do Empty Stomachs cause Riots?

A full gut supports moral precepts
-Burmese Proverb

Spread the table and contention will cease
-English proverb

A society is only three meals away from anarchy.
-British Sci-Fi show, Red Dwarf

What causes riots? No, not the riots in London but riots in general, around the world? Researchers at the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Mass. think they've found a clue.

This graph shows the average price of food and the riot events around the world. Above a certain food price threshold, social unrest sweeps the planet. It stands to reason that people become desperate when food is difficult to obtain. The French Revolution was preceded by a food crisis when the price of bread became too high for the common working man to afford (which led to the famous reply by the French queen, "Let them eat cake.")

The researches say that high food prices don't necessarily trigger riots themselves, they simply create a tipping point in which social unrest can flourish. "These observations are consistent with a hypothesis that high global food prices are a precipitating condition for social unrest," according to Marco Lagi.

Bottom Line

Why are food prices so high? One reason is traders speculating on the price of food, a problem that has worsened in recent years by the deregulation of the commodities markets and the removal of trading limits for buyers and sellers. (Recall what Enron did to the price of energy in California with abusive trading.)

A second reason is the conversion of corn into ethanol. The supply of corn for food has been greatly reduced. I recently read that half of the US corn supply is being turned into ethanol.

The US really needs to stop subsidising ethanol. We are using taxpayer money to make expensive fuel from corn and creating starvation as a byproduct.

A Future for Fossil Fuels?

“Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!”
- Golda Meir

Salon.com reports that "Everything you've heard about fossil fuels may be wrong". Yes we may be at or even past Peak Oil, but oil is just one of many fossil fuels.

Hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" is much disputed today as it is rumored to make groundwater flammable in some areas. And yet it has been highly successful with previously-unrecoverable “shale gas”.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, these advances mean there is at least six times as much recoverable natural gas today as there was a decade ago.

Also,

• "Fracking also permits the extraction of previously-unrecoverable 'tight oil,' thereby postponing the day when the world runs out of petroleum."
• "There is enough coal to produce energy for centuries."
• Researchers are "studying ways to obtain energy from gas hydrates, which mix methane with ice in high-density formations under the seafloor. The potential energy in gas hydrates may equal that of all other fossils, including other forms of natural gas, combined."

And with oil at $100 a barrel, tar sands and shale oil have become economically viable and competitive.

Bottom Line

"Are we living at the beginning of the Age of Fossil Fuels, not its final decades?"

What price progress?

"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It's not."
— Dr. Seuss (The Lorax)

I came across this interesting photo on BoingBoing.com with this caption:

These pillars—located outside a rest area off Highway 80 in Adair County, Iowa—represent the topsoil Iowa has lost since large-scale farming began 150 years ago. In the 19th century, Iowa had 14-16 inches of topsoil. Today, it has just 6-8 inches of the stuff, and more is being lost all the time.

Bottom Line

The "West" achieved incredible progress during the Industrial Revolution and up to the present. But we did it by consuming vast quantities of resources such as topsoil. Think back on the extinction of the passenger pigeon which once darkened the skies or the near extinction of the American Bison. Look at the depleted fishing grounds around the world. Is "peak oil" in the near future or already in our past?

Will we find different resources to exploit in the future or will there be a day when we "run out"? What do you think?

The Allure of Gold

"And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense and myrrh" - Matthew 2:11 KJV

With financially unstable times, some investors put their money in gold. But why gold, what makes gold so special? NPR Money Planet asked Sanat Kumar, a chemical engineer at Columbia University, to examine the 118 elements in the Periodic Table to find which ones could be used as money.

The orange column on the far right is all gasses - so cross that off.

The light orange elements on the far left are very reactive and can burn or explode. Sanat crossed out another 38 elements as too reactive for safe keeping.

The two rows on the bottom of the chart are radioactive; cross them off.

These three rules: Not a gas, Doesn't corrode or burn, and Doesn't kill you, reduces the list of usable elements from 118 to just 30.

Some of the 30, like carbon, are just too common to be "valuable". Imagine a currency that anyone can make from wood!  And a few of the 30 are just too rare  - for example osmium comes mostly from meteorites.

Eliminate the too common and extremely rare and you are left with five "precious metals", rhodium, palladium, silver, platinum and gold. Silver is popular and used as a currency but it tarnishes; it is mildly reactive with air. I'm not that familiar with rhodium or palladium and apparently few are, they were not discovered until the early 1800s due to their rarity. They belong to the platinum group of metals. One quarter of all goods manufactured today either contain platinum group metals or the platinum group metals play a key role during their manufacturing process.

That leaves platinum and gold as safe, non-reactive metals, both of which can be found in rivers and streams in limited but not super rare quantities. Gold was preferred because it melts at a lower temperature (just under 2000 degrees Fahrenheit) and could be fashioned into art and coinage by pre-industrial people. Gold artifacts in the Balkans appear from the 4th millennium BC.

The melting point for platinum is over 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Sanat says,  "For the earth, ... gold is the sweet spot. It would come out no other way."

According to Wikipedia, "Gold has been widely used throughout the world as a vehicle for monetary exchange ... [but] pure gold is too soft for day-to-day monetary use and is typically hardened by alloying with copper, silver or other base metals. The gold content of alloys is measured in carats (k). Pure gold is designated as 24k. English gold coins intended for circulation from 1526 into the 1930s were typically a standard 22k alloy called crown gold."

Modern bullion coins used for investment are frequently pure gold. The popular Canadian Gold Maple Leaf coin has a purity of 99.99%.

Bottom Line

How rare is Gold? We see it everywhere as gold leaf, gold wire connections in computer chips, gold fillings, etc. There is an estimated 158,000 British tonnes of gold that has been excavated globally. This sounds like a lot but gold is very heavy,  a cubic meter of gold would weigh 19.3 tonnes. All the gold in the world would fit inside a cube 20.15 meters, or 66 feet 1.3 inches on each edge. Consider that the Washington Monument measures 55 feet by 55 feet at its base and is 555 feet tall (17 x 17 x 170 m). If you wanted to rebuild the Washington Monument in solid gold, all the gold known to man would only reach 1/3 the height of the monument.

Platinum is slightly more rare. All of the platinum in the entire world would easily fit inside the average home.

National Debt

After 20 years in Congress, I still believe that smaller government and lower taxes are the most effective economic policies.
- Howard Coble (R - NC, 6th District)

Time for my next government rant. :-)
I've been seeing many stories this past week on the size of the National Debt.

Our Debt Is More Than All the Money in the World points out that in 2008 the US debt was conservatively estimated to be $70 Trillion. (70,000,000,000,000) At the same time the global M3 money supply ("meaning cash, consumer-account deposits, checkable accounts, CDs, long-term deposits, travelers’ checks, money-market funds, the whole enchilada") was $60 Trillion. The Global GDP (value of produced goods) was also $60 Trillion. So in 2008 (pre-Obama) neither all the money in the World nor the total value of ALL goods produced was suffient to pay our debt. The debt has since become much worse.

For 2010 the annual US budget deficit will be the second largest in 65 years compared to GDP. The largest gap in 65 years was last year with the famous Stimulus package at 9.9% of the GDP. This is the same as spending 109.9% of what your takehome pay. This year we are over budget by 109.1%. Suppose you earn $100,000 with $70,000 net after taxes. With overspending at 10%-9% you add an additional $7,000 - $6,000 to your credit card EACH year that you can not pay back.

Where did this money go? Who knows? The beaucrats won't say, Financial crisis panel stonewalls Congress.

Bottom Line
How bad is the problem? Investors are losing faith in America, Treasurys Tumble Following Weak 30-Year Sale. (That's 30-year bonds backed by the US Government).

World Population

“USA Today has come out with a new survey - apparently, three out of every four people make up 75% of the population.”
- David Letterman

There is a great deal of truth to the adage "a picture is worth a thousand words." A great graph can make a point much better than mere words. For example I know India and China both have over 1 billion people out of a world total of 6.7 billion. But I never visualized this as nearly half of the world's people. The chart below shows how people are distributed throughout the world by latitude and longitude. Note the spikes for India and China.

Bottom Line
The bottom graph sure puts the US in perspective. We use the most resources in the world with the lowest population density. Unless they have traveled to Europe or Asia, most Americans have no appreciation for how land-rich we are; how uncrowded in comparison. We think nothing of large parks, golf courses, giant cemeteries, thousand acre farms, etc. Open land is rare and expensive elsewhere in the world.

Global Cities

“When you look at a city, it's like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.”
- Hugh Newell Jacobsen

The concept of the nation state is only about a century old. Historically Western civilization has been ruled over by either city-states or Empires. We speak of "ancient Greece" but there was not a single Greek culture or government - instead the cities of Athens, Sparta, Corinth, etc. battled between themselves for supremecy with the victor making slaves of the losers. It's to the Greek's credit that they could unite and defeat the armies of the massive Persian empire but internal warfare left them weak when Alexander the Great swept through and conquered the Greeks as the first step in his Empire building.

The world map comprised of "nations" is a consequence of the Paris Peace Treaty of World War 1. The Austria-Hungarian Emprire was broken up into states. The British Empire and others remained (for awhile) but they "promised" to "educate" their subject colonies towards independence. That promise was not kept - it took Ghandi and massive peaceful rebellion for India to win independence. But the direction of history was clear in the decades after WWI - the age of Empires was over.

Since WWI I'm not aware of any two states merging - yes the US gained territory with Alaska and Hawaii, but the trend over the past 100 years has been the break-up of nations. Korea - North and South, Czechoslovakia - into the Czech and Slovak Republics, Yugoslavia - into many parts, Soviet Union - broken into many parts. For the 21st century an article at ForeignPolicy.com states that "The age of nations is over. The new urban age has begun."  It notes that the world is returning to a governance model where cities rule.

"More than half the world lives in cities, and the percentage is growing rapidly. But just 100 cities account for 30 percent of the world's economy, and almost all its innovation. ... New York City's economy alone is larger than 46 of [the] sub-Saharan Africa's economies combined. Hong Kong receives more tourists annually than all of India. ... cities are the real magnets of economies, the innovators of politics, and, increasingly, the drivers of diplomacy. ... This new world of cities won't obey the same rules as the old compact of nations; they will write their own opportunistic codes of conduct, animated by the need for efficiency, connectivity, and security above all else

"Then there are the megacities, superpopulous urban zones that are worlds unto themselves but that -- for now -- still punch below their weight class economically: Think Lagos, Manila, or Mexico City. When Tokyo in 1980 became the first metropolitan area to reach a population of 20 million, the figure seemed almost unimaginable. Now we need to get used to the idea of nearly 100 million people clustered around Mumbai or Shanghai."

Bottom Line

Look at a satellite map of the world at night. The cities are quite apparent and dominant. You don't see nation boundaries from satellites.

A lesson from Greece

"Beware of Greeks bearing Gifts" - regarding the Trojan Horse from the Iliad

The nation of Greece is teetering on bankruptcy and Europe is wondering what to do. Bail them out or cut the strings that bind so Greece does not pull down the entire European Union.

Three articles today caught my eye:

Super-wealthy investors move billions out of Greece

One way to "balance" the budget is to raise taxes, and in particular to tax the wealthy. The rich are no fools and are pulling their money out of the country while they can.

Greece ‘Dress Rehearsal’ for U.S., Deutsche Bank Says

What is happening in Greece is similar to California and soon perhaps the US itself.

Maybe Greece Should Go Bankrupt

I like this article. Capitalism is based upon survival of the fittest. When there is no penalty for failure there is no incentive for progress and efficiency. Everyone gets fat and lazy.

"Bailing out Greece will reward over-spending politicians and make future fiscal crises more likely. In a four-year period between 2005 and 2009, Greek politicians expanded the burden of government spending from an already excessive level of 43.8 percent of GDP to an even more excessive level of 51.3 percent of GDP. Subsidies are rampant, the public sector is bloated, civil service pay is way too high, and entitlements are wildly unsustainable. A fiscal crisis – with no escape options – is probably the only hope of reversing these disastrous policies. So why, then, would it make sense for Germany and other nations to provide an escape option?"

"Bailing out Greece will reward greedy and short-sighted interest groups, particularly overpaid government workers. Greece is in trouble because the the people riding in society’s wagon assumed that there would always be enough chumps to pull the wagon. In reality, Greece is turning into a real-world version of Atlas Shrugged. Government has become such a burden that the job creators and wealth generators have given up and/or moved their money out of the country. Should taxpayers in other nations reward the greed and narcissism of Greece’s interest groups by being forced to pull the wagon instead?"

Bottom Line

Maybe Greece Should Go Bankrupt provides an apt conclusion:

I have sometimes warned audiences of what will happen when a majority of voters in a country or a state become dependent on government. In such an environment, it obviously becomes much more difficult to put together an electoral coalition that will lead to fiscal changes that shrink the burden of government and curtail the predatory state. This is what has happened to Greece, and what is soon going to happen in other European nations (and, barring reform, what will eventually happen in the United States).

Ghost Ships

“Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, Only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence”- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Although some economists and pundits are declaring the recession over, color me more pessimistic. One website that I keep on eye on is Kiplinger’s Recover Index. They list six leading economic indicators and only two of them are “fully positive”. One of the positives, an increase in existing home sales, says more about the collapse of mortgages and house prices than about the strength of buying power. And harking back to an earlier post, what does “success” mean here? Kiplinger says that just three positive indexes would indicate that the recession is over. I’d set the bar higher and suggest at least 4 out of 6 before declaring victory.

Economics is a complex science with many time-delayed built in interactions. It’s possible for unemployment to decline, yet the newly employed people are still shell-shocked and reluctant to spend for a while. So store sales and profits remain low which slows down future hiring.

A well-written article on the stalled state of the global economy appeared in the UK Daily Mail Online, Revealed: The Ghost Fleet of the Recession. Hundreds of the world’s cargo ships have been parked off the southern shores of Malaysia, near Singapore. A local fisherman says, “We don't understand why they are here. There are so many ships but no one seems to be on board. When we sail past them in our fishing boats we never see anyone. They are like real ghost ships and some people are scared of them.”

The answer is that 12% of the global cargo fleet has nothing to ship (this could climb to 25% before things improve). Business and profits have plummeted, “This time last year, an Aframax tanker capable of carrying 80,000 tons of cargo would cost £31,000 a day ($50,000). Now it is about £3,400 ($5,500).” The ghost ships sit idle waiting for better times ahead.

Bottom Line

Curiously despite the glut in cargo ships, new ones are still being built. It takes three years to build a ship so orders placed when the economy was good in 2006 are ready to hit the water and the delivery bill is due. But now some clients are unable (or unwilling) to pay and the ships are sold instead on the open market for a bargain price. New orders have slowed to a trickle so expect the ship building industry to remain in recession for several years to come.

For another sign of slow sales and unsold inventory, check out these picutues of new unsold cars www.guardian.co.uk/business/gallery/2009/jan/16/unsold-cars

Here is another article claiming that the financial crisis is just the first in a series of interlinked crisises as one problem cascades to another. http://www.financialarmageddon.com/2009/09/still-in-the-economic-crisis.html

Update

CONSUMER CONFIDENCE INDEX drops in September.

Modern Warfare

“War is Hell” – General Sherman, US Civil War

I suspect that when most of us picture “warfare” we imagine movie scenes from WWII or Vietnam with soldiers in the fields dodging artillery shells and bullets and land mines. But war has many faces, some modern/some ancient, including espionage, biological, financial and morale attacks.

Two days ago I discussed a WSJ article claiming that the CIA has found sleeping “time-bombs” in US utility computer systems. The concern is that Russians or Chinese could shut down our power grid or water systems via Internet espionage.

Most people would guess that biological/chemical warfare is something new with germs & DNA experiments and Anthrax in the mail. But think back to WWI and mustard gas attacks. Two centuries ago US pioneers gave Indians blankets from smallpox victims in an early attempt at viral warfare. I suspect bio/chemical war goes even further back.

A recent article in Politico.com describes how the Pentagon preps for economic warfare. In the first every financial war-game simulation, five teams representing The United States, Russia, China, East Asia and “all others” battled for supremacy with the world economy as the battleground. China won by taking advantage of damage that the US and Russia inflicted upon each.

Lastly there is the concept of demoralizing your enemy in the hope of encouraging an easy surrender. Sadly I see the US doing this to itself. Universities and the media love to portray the US as the cause of the world’s problem; or as an especially evil or unjust nation. Our own President apologizied for past US actions during his European Tour. I’m reminded of Pogo saying, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Bottom Line
The principles of warfare have not changed – soldiers, arms, espionage, spying, finance, morale, etc. But what has changed is the technology of warfare. Modern weapons in the arsenal of death allow individuals to kill millions with a computer virus, a biological virus, a suitcase nuclear bomb, and so on. Few people realize how dangerous this truly is. In the past it took the resources of a nation to start a war resulting in massive death. Now a millionaire, like Osama Bin Laden or George Soros, can fund a private war against America or a President they dislike. So far, we have been extremely lucky that physical terrorist attacks have been small scale. We have not been so lucky against morale attacks. Example:

"At the recent meeting of G-20 nations in London, officials from many nations agreed on one thing -- that the United States is to blame for the world recession. [AND] President Obama agreed." But in realitiy IT DIDN'T START HERE

"America, to hear President Obama tell it, is an occasionally arrogant nation struggling with shameful legacies of racism and discrimination, one that bears a large share of the blame for the world's economic and climate crises. Oh, and our train service is lousy." - Obama tries out role as apologizer-in-chief

Update

Speaking of one-man espionage, "PHONE SABOTAGE IN SAN JOSE." One man climbed 10 feet down a manhole and clipped five or so fiber optic phone lines cutting off phone service, ATMs, and 911 for Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties. “It’s kind of like an earthquake” said one victim.

Record Unemployment

"500 million Americans lose their jobs every month."- 2009, Nancy Pelosi (US Speaker of the House) [The US population is 306 million]

More bad economic news I’m afraid. U.S. job losses accelerate says Reuters. Job losses in January 2009 were 598,000, the most in 34 years, and the unemployment rate reached to a 16-year high.

"The economy is just falling into oblivion and it will get worse," - Greg Salvaggio, vice president for trading at Tempus Consulting in Washington

“January's sharp drop in employment brings job losses to 3.6 million since the start of the recession in December 2007” and "about half the decline occurred in the last three months." - U.S. Commissioner of Labor Statistics Keith Hall

"It is just another confirmation that we are in a deep and long recession, and the bottom is not even in sight. Manufacturing is incredibly weak -- it's going to be a long haul." - Robert MacIntosh, chief economist for Eaton Vance Management in Boston

Unfortunately the Democrat plan to throw money in all directions and hope that things are “stimulated” is unlikely to work. Here a few reasons why:

A new book, Welcome to Obamaland: I Have Seen Your Future and It Doesn't Work by James Delingpole, describes how the Stimulus plan & Obama look a lot like Tony Blair’s England from ten years ago. If we follow the British path, the US can expect

“a morass of sprawling government that will slowly start suffocating our economy, our liberties, and our culture… From the socialized medicine that will make us want to avoid going to the doctor even when our hand is on fire; to eco-fascism that will have us spending millions … to protect un-endangered, man-eating polar bears; to immigration non-reform that will leave us wondering what country we're living in anyway; to a further dumbing down of an already execrable school system, with more PC inanities, such as banning "competitive
games" because it might disturb children's self-esteem”

The article, Is Britain going bankrupt?, states “Alistair Darling [Chancellor of the Exchequer ] has had to admit that the British economy [today] faces the most sudden economic collapse since World War Two, and the worst budget deficit of any major country in the world”

Japan tried to spend it’s way out of recession with infrastructure projects. The New York Times (shock!) noted that Japan’s Big-Works Stimulus Is Lesson.

“Japan’s rural areas have been paved over and filled in with roads, dams and other big infrastructure projects, the legacy of trillions of dollars spent to lift the economy from a severe downturn caused by the bursting of a real estate bubble in the late 1980s. During those nearly two decades, Japan accumulated the largest public debt in the developed world — totaling 180 percent of its $5.5 trillion economy — while failing to generate a convincing recovery.”

Bottom Line

Will the US government learn from the mistakes of others? Don’t bet on it. Timothy Geithner, Obama’s Secretary of the Treasury, “was a young financial attaché in Japan during the collapse and subsequent doldrums.” But he got the lesson backwards and believes we need to spend more and faster than Japan did!

“Economists tend to divide into two camps on the question of Japan’s infrastructure spending: those, many of them Americans like Mr. Geithner [Obama’s Secretary of the Treasury], who think it did not go far enough; and those, many of them Japanese, who think it was a colossal waste.” - NYT

Who do you think is right?