Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Places’ Category

I came across a rather comprehensive take on how bad things are in the Spanish economy which makes for some interesting, if long, reading.

Spain is one of those places that hasn’t, yet, featured on the news in terms of problems with their banks which is surprising in some ways as it’s not a country that one would ordinarily consider as having strong banks. However, that’s misleading as the countries with the supposedly strong banks have nearly all run into trouble by now but largely because that strength enabled them to start operating on the international stage and thereby pick up problems that they’d not have gotten had they stuck to their domestic market.

Spain is different in that, for the most part, the banks seem to have acted to pull money into the country but that has created something of a problem since, as the article points out, it has created a climate where there’s been a little too much money knocking around. The problem in Spains case is that the developers have used that money to build far too many houses and now find themselves with a rapidly increasing stock of unsold houses.

The solution? Well, the developers would like more money to build even more houses but that glut of houses means that prices are falling rapidly in reality although that doesn’t show up in official statistics as those are based on estimates of the value of the houses rather than what they’re actually selling for. As elsewhere, the list prices of those houses bears little reality to the price at which they are really selling for and therefore it’s very difficult to get a clear picture of what’s really happening. Despite that, it appears that the fall of 50% or so the previous year will be followed by yet more falls to come.

That continued falling of prices spells trouble for the builders. In accounting terms, they’re presently holding them as trading stock but the falls are forcing them to reconsider them as assets for sale. That might satisfy the accountants but unperforming assets are no good to anyone and, of course, they can’t sell them. Nor can they reduce the prices by as much as normal people could because they’d then be into potentially serious losses.

In fact the solution seems to be to let a significant proportion of the developers go bankrupt and reduce building to more normal levels thus letting the stock of unsold homes find buyers. Not an easy solution but then if, as seems likely, we’re heading into a depression rather than a recession then no solution is going to be an easy one… last time around it took WW2 to get us out of it.

Open education is becoming an increasingly popular thing for various universities around the world to produce these days.

The quality of what’s on offer varies enormously of course. Normal redbrick universities will put on anything from small samplers through to pretty much entire courses in the case of Yale. Ironically, the sample from the more open universities is at the other end of the scale with, for example, the Open University offering very small segments of a wide range of courses in contrast to Yales complete versions of a small number of courses.

Why the difference?

For Yale, the course samples on offer are something of an advertisement for the university and creates quite a bit of good PR too as segments of some of the courses currently on offer have been used by a range of educational establishments to liven up their own course presentations. The situation with the Open University is quite different. They’re not so much advertising the university as the courses themselves thus whilst in the Yale selection you’ll find the complete introductory pschology course (which is absolutely fascinating), from the Open University you’ll find just four units from their equivalent course.

The “problem” with all of these offerings is that they’re quite addictive and it’s tempting to seriously consider signing up for the full thing. Now, that “full thing” is $35,000 a year in Yale (that’s for 8 to 10 courses similar to those that you’ll see online ie around $4,000 a course) or around $4.500 for the full credit course in the Open University (assuming that you’re paying the full price, $2,000 if you live in the UK and get the subsidity). Interestingly, it’s actually cheaper to do the course in America which is contrary to what most people would expect.

For various reasons the majority of online booking systems in Europe are run by UK based companies which means that we regularly get phone calls from them during the peak holiday season.

Almost without fail, they start off in French which is fair enough as they’re phoning a French hotel. However, we know they’re from the UK since we see the phone number before we answer the phone so we always start off in English.

What’s really surprising is how long the brits keep going in, usually, bad French before it dawns on them that we’ve been talking English to them from the start. Even when the penny does drop, their first question afterwards is “do you speak English”!

Isn’t it peculiar how our brains work like that?

Isn’t it strange the way that when someone you’ve not seen in several years appears on the scene, it’s as though the years between didn’t exist?

I’ve just had quite an enjoyable night chatting with an old work colleage (DG) who’s staying with us this evening. What’s perhaps even stranger is that some of the old fixtures in the workplace are still very much fixtures although sometimes it seems like if I went back there I’d be the only one left of the “old guard”!

One thing that constantly confuses is that whenever we have a trip to Spain the diesel that we’ve bought there seems to last considerably longer than when the diesel that we ordinarily buy in France.

A LOT longer too. For example, we filled the car up Friday a week ago in Spain, have been running around quite a bit during the week and only needed to get some more last Friday. Ordinarily we’d have been expecting to top up at least once during the week.

Weird, huh?