Norway has never been “blessed” with an auto industry, save for its role as provider of parts to car makers throughout Europe, not exactly in demand these days. With an international auto industry threatening to file for bankruptcy, drastic measures have been made to keep it afloat, both in terms of governmental bailouts and a massive reorientation towards environment-friendly cars.
One would think that electric vehicle producers have a field day, all things considered. In Norway not so. In spite of the country’s apparent financial success amid global recession (I suggest …

Most of us have harboured great expectations to U.S. president Barack H. Obama, but very few of us expected immediate — and such welcome — results. If he keeps up this pace, there’s really no limits to what he can achieve.
Only last night, for instance, president Obama signalled a new era for global economy, indicating that America can no longer “be the sole engine of global growth”, which is something the rest of us have known for quite som time (as, I suspect, has he):
[…] However, the days of super …

According to Norwegian newspapers, the electric car manufacturer Think‘s financial reserves will last only a couple of days. It isn’t the first time, though, as the company, dating back to the early 1990′s, was sold to the Ford Motor Company in 1999, to an international car manufacturing group in 2003, but has been on Norwegian hands for the last couple of years.
Even if the implications of a bankruptcy are serious for those involved, they really aren’t that many. Comparing with the international auto industry crisis just isn’t fair, but it …

Talk about bad timing, financial unrest considered and all. Nevertheless I stumbled upon these bottles of “champagne” for kids in the neighbourhood’s #1 supermarket yesterday. It goes without saying that the children of well to do areas need to acquire basic skills in handling bare essentials, such as the prescribed number of Dom Perignons a day (if not necessarily extra brut — initially, anyway), but, as mentioned, the timing could have been better, of course.
The local chief constable reported several credit crunch-related, self-inflicted homicides over the last month, the other …

Amid daily news of an ever-crumbling US auto industry, there’s been much talk of the bailout the automaker CEOs tried to negotiate in Washington DC the other day, among so many bailouts that it’s beginning to get increasingly harder to believe in the Federal Reserve’s ability to carry the weight. President-elect Barack Obama acted pretty swiftly on the matter, too, on the first possible occasion – during his wife’s and his guided tour of The White House the other week.
If action isn’t taken, and taken fast, the entire industry is …

Norwegian tax authorities released the nation’s income tax return figures today, which makes the headlines in the Norwegian newspapers every year. We’re all invited to delve into our friends’ and neighbours’ income and tax figures, as the online newspapers also offer a prominent search function, usually pretty close to the website’s masthead. So that’s what we’re up to over here today, digging into our peers’ private lives.
There’s an element of envy therein, of course, as well as a certain amount of very unsympathetic curiosity, which very much denotes the collective …

As we all know, US president George W. Bush’s plead for a USD 700 billion bi-partisan bailout plan failed yesterday. Quite a few Republicans attribute the failure to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who, apparently, did not stick to the original transcript for the speech she gave prior to the congressional vote. I think I’d better quote Politico on this one:
[…] But anyone who looked at the transcript of Pelosi’s speech released by her office might have been puzzled by the complaints.
The transcript seemed relatively tame - with only relatively mild shots …

When the very symbols of America and everything American – Chrysler, Ford and GM – need a USD 25 billion dollar federal rescue plan in order to survive… That’s when you know The Great Depression 2™ simply has to be just around the corner. I think we’d be well advised not to look at recent developments in the American economy as an American problem, as Wall Street (and the American economy as such) has a huge impact on just about any economy in the world. There’s a contradiction in there, …

It’s a bit ironic, wouldn’t you say, that the current American administration (through the Fed), champion of the free market and freedom of enterprise, just recently nationalised Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and, so far, AIG – a measure usually attributed to socialists like Hugo Chávez and the likes of him.
Still, you can’t blame them for trying to avoid a collapse, which seems more and more inevitable day by day. And then, of course, there’s the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, just one day ahead of the AIG intervention. Norwegian banks and finance …