http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/ … story.html
1) Be financially responsible when times are good so that when they go bad, it doesn't hurt as much. They had a 3.6% budget surplus while we had a 3% budget deficit in 2007. Sweden's gross debt is going to be 45 percent of the size of their economy... ours is closing in on 100
2) Sweden's social welfare programs may have played a part, as they were already in place. Meanwhile, it took a while for the US to implement the stimulus bill, and several one-time programs took months to start pumping money in to the economy.
3) Aggressive monetary policy. They aggressively lowered their interest rates and actually made on rate below zero.
4) Having the value of currency be flexible. Sweden doesn't use the Euro, so they aren't really affected by the European Central Bank's decisions while their neighbor Finland is. The US was also affected in a similar way because the dollar is the global reserve currency.
5) Bankers should not be "so cushioned from the consequences of their unwise decisions as to go straight back to the old ways." Apparently Swedish banks and investors were much less willing to take risks on the housing market compared to the rest of the world.
What do you all think? I've always found Sweden and those other Nordic countries pretty admirable for their economies and standards of living, but I wonder if they're sustainable?
For the tl;dr camp:Washington Post wrote:
Sweden was far from immune to the global downturn of 2008-09. But unlike other countries, it is bouncing back. Its 5.5 percent growth rate last year trounces the 2.8 percent expansion in the United States and was stronger than any other developed nation in Europe. And compared with the United States, unemployment peaked lower (around 9 percent, compared with 10 percent) and has come down faster (it now stands near 7 percent, compared with 9 percent in the U.S.).
1) Be financially responsible when times are good so that when they go bad, it doesn't hurt as much. They had a 3.6% budget surplus while we had a 3% budget deficit in 2007. Sweden's gross debt is going to be 45 percent of the size of their economy... ours is closing in on 100
2) Sweden's social welfare programs may have played a part, as they were already in place. Meanwhile, it took a while for the US to implement the stimulus bill, and several one-time programs took months to start pumping money in to the economy.
3) Aggressive monetary policy. They aggressively lowered their interest rates and actually made on rate below zero.
4) Having the value of currency be flexible. Sweden doesn't use the Euro, so they aren't really affected by the European Central Bank's decisions while their neighbor Finland is. The US was also affected in a similar way because the dollar is the global reserve currency.
5) Bankers should not be "so cushioned from the consequences of their unwise decisions as to go straight back to the old ways." Apparently Swedish banks and investors were much less willing to take risks on the housing market compared to the rest of the world.
What do you all think? I've always found Sweden and those other Nordic countries pretty admirable for their economies and standards of living, but I wonder if they're sustainable?
