Is there anywhere which is doing OK? Or is it doom and gloom pretty much everywhere? I hear Australia is not too bad....

Real GDP growth of 1.3 per cent quarter-on-quarter in the first quarter, up from 0.6 per cent growth in the fourth, certainly makes Australia an outlier compared with the stagnant economies of much of the developed world. But beneath the surface there are signs that all is not well Down Under.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/wall-street-journal/australian-growth-data-could-be-misleading/story-fnay3x58-1226387168625

Italy actual: New gasoline taxes because the earthquake. New property tax, for the first home about 500€, if you are a second home owner + about 1600€, but no one know how much it will be and the first share is to pay for the 18 of this month. You go to sleep and don´t know if you wake up and the government has used his fantasy for creating a new tax; so much insecurity that no one spends. Yesterday another businessmann killed itself after receiving the tax notice:

http://ansa.it/web/notizie/rubriche/cronaca/2012/06/08/Cartella-esattoriale-117mila-euro-uccide_7002565.html

It´s not all because of tax but this don´t helps..

until it collapses (hopefully soon)

I hope also so, hope also that people (me too) will become a new consciousness.

China is doing alright and as long as China is doing alright, Australia will be doing alright.

@brianluce

Brian heard code word. China :-) LOL.

In reality they are doing fine. But. Look at the latest energy related posts. China has biggest trouble. They need not only to increase energy consumption per individual, but they must move angricultural part into modern infrastructure. And world simply does not have energy for this operation.
And if goverment will openly state that hundreds of millions will stay on current level for long time... No one can predict outcome :-)

@theteddy

Issue is that problem is more complex than most think. I mean change of people in elites, parties or goverments.
To develop in the modern world you need slightly more - fight for resources, fight for markets.
All this has very old history.
But this time fight will be enormous. And as it can be dangerious for elites, they do only thing they thing they can do.
Fuck the people. Reduce consumption, try to conserve nuclear plants (no, not shut down as they told you).

@duartix: Iceland is a very special case. Iceland has less inhabitants than e.g. the city of Frankfurt. Economically they are now about where they were before they had this huge financial gamble going on (when Icelands banks had attracted a huge amounts of savings from foreign countries by promising unusually high interest rates, had gambled high stakes with that foreign money, until the bubble collapsed and the banks told the foreign investors their savings were lost).

Before that episode and again today, Iceland is a small economy that exports little and imports almost everything. But unlike Greece, the people of Iceland seem to be fine with working a lot (most Icelanders I met had more than just one job and worked more than 10 hours each day) and they seem to not mind paying high prices for the (not so many) imported goods they can afford.

To me, it's fine how Iceland manages its economy, but any attempt to transfer their way of living to let's say Greece or Italy would certainly result in immediate public uproar and violent protests.

In general, I would not try to force a strategy of "perpetual growth" or GDP-optimization on other countries. If people are fine with a smaller amount of imported goods, if they don't expect others to work for them while they don't want to, that's a very sustainable state. But lending such people lots of money, expecting that at some point in time they will suddenly become productive and start to work hard - that is outright stupid and bound to fail.

@jrd

Considering Iceland:

http://joyb.blogspot.com/2011/10/report-on-economic-situation-in-iceland.html

The government of Ireland, by contrast, socialized the debt incurred by its private banks, impoverishing the whole country in the process. It's really a question of who's asked to suffer: lending banks which made very bad business decisions out of greed and stupidity, or ordinary people who had absolutely nothing to do with these decisions.

While stronger ( and smarter) goverment is good, it is not the solution it is just one of requirements.
Countries (and people) who think that this is solution will be badly disappointed soon.

Can't speak to how sustainable the Iceland recovery is or will be, but since bank insolvency is the norm today throughout the world, and none of these institutions could survive without government guarantees, the only apparent solution would seem to be nationalizing financial industries world-wide, restructuring loans to reflect current asset values and treating large financial institutions like utilities -- heavily regulated, with limited profits consistent with the taxpayer guarantees they receive and the monopolies they enjoy. The U.S. had something like that system until the 1980s, and it was remarkably stable. But in those days, bond traders didn't earn much more than teachers.

So I wouldn't hold my breath....

Some people think economic collapse is not only inevitable, but desirable. For example, this guy argues that collapse of some form is necessary to find a sustainable solution in the longer term. I'm starting to think he may be correct.

http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/the-solution-is-collapse

Most of the fucking rating agencies are based in US and this is not a coincidence - there is a bigger blue print for what is going on now. So if i can add to Vitaliy's idea, the first to go should be these arbitrary, biased, speculating crime gangs called rating agencies(US or Not).

For the people that talk crap about Greece, Italy, Spain and then praise highly the northern states, a fast "rhetoric" question: why are all these south places invaded by northern tourist and expatriates? Of course there is a difference in efficiency between the north and the south, but to imply that people in the south of Europe are not wanting to work is just a bs stereotype and has nothing to do with reality, things are more complex.