OMG

omg omg omg

Unemployment! It's.... 6%?

Hmm.

OK Yes I know that I owe you guys both the step-by-step how to move to NL blog and the "This is my town" picture blog... but...

In case Americans don't know it, the world watches. The world watches when Santorum calls Obama a "snob" for wishing that every American would seek one year of post-high-school education. The world watches everything America does. Not necessarily in admiration, but always with intense curiosity.

No of course they don't all see you as lab rats. Maybe a little. But not entirely!

In case you haven't gotten the memo, US banks made loans that made Greek bankers look respectable. To cover these loans, they had to stake their own net worth against them. So if the loans fail the banks fail. Except ... not. Banks used to have to have the net worth to guarantee loans they made. But then came "leveraging." Which is basically imaginary money that allowed banks to loan out up to 50 times as much money as they had. Mmmmm derivatives. Yeah. Imaginary money.

Anyway, these banks then bundled the loans they knew would never be repaid and sold them as ordinary securities. All over the world.

What got banks in Netherlands, England, France, Spain, Italy, and Germany in trouble? You guessed it. Those securities. Don't lose any sleep; they worked it out with their banks, generally at a profit to the government, like the 400 billion the Dutch government got back off of one bank last year, after paying for that bank's support role in the Greek crisis.

But since the whole world is feeling the effects of the US banks' madness, of course we're all suffering equally, right?

Just this morning I watched an alarmed news anchor announce a 6% unemployment rate.

[Insert Scooby noise.]

Now half the Scooby noise is just for fun and half is because the US would be throwing a huge party if the unemployement rate dropped to 6%.

But the other half (Yes I am aware of the basic rules of fractions and that I have just made one and a half out of a whole. I do not care; it is my blog and one of the halves only counted for fun so nanananana.) is that my dear US friends continue to kindly inform me that socialism simply does not work. It's a defunct idea of the last century that has been proven to be wrong wrong wrong and can not work.

Hi. My name is Gayle, and I live in the socialist country Netherlands. Netherlands has been socialist since the late 1800s. Yet it continues to land in the top 10 countries in terms of quality of life, year after year after decade after century.

Could someone please let me know when this whole socialism "fad" is going to prove to be devastating to Netherlands? I want to make sure I get out in time. I'm still American at heart, after all.