Walking to work.
Here is a shot of Sydney’s skyline from my morning walk to work.
One of the things I find really interesting about living in another country (Australia) than the one I grew up in (Sweden) is having an outsider’s perspective, both on my new and old “home”. I follow Swedish newspapers online, but find that only international news sources give a really good view of what is going on over there. The big issues are drowned in the everyday noise of trivial small stories. The same is true about Australian news; the domestic news sources might report on big issues but 9 out of 10 stories are always about some kitten lost up a tree somewhere or what some celebrity did last night. I find that the signal/noise ratio is much, much better in news sources based away from the source of the signal / news story. Australian, British and American observers give me a better understanding of what is going on in Sweden than Swedish media. And Swedish media report really well on what is going on abroad. The rule of thumb seems to be that when you only write about the outside world once a week, you cut to the chase and only summarise the most important bits. When you write about your home market every day, you let too much clutter into your reports, drowning the important stories.
One story that has caught my attention this week is of how the Swedish federal reserve (The Riksbank) has cut interest rates to 0.25%, and in the process reducing the effective deposit rate to a NEGATIVE 0.25%. The result, of course, is a run on deposits and a sharp deflation of the value of the Swedish krona against other currencies. (This is something which I am quite happy about since I am earning my money in Australian dollars and am going to Sweden on holiday in a couple of weeks’ time.) That the official rate is close to 0 is an alarming sign of how battered the Swedish economy is, but yet I find very little outrage about this in Swedish media. To the average Swede, it is business as usual with the holiday weather being of more interest than matters of the economy’s competitiveness. All the while observers outside the country write articles about how the Swedish economy is losing value rapidly and warning that things look quite dire for Sweden. Interesting.
AUD to SEK exchange rate development over time.
Government debt at the Economist.
Volvo, Ikea, Abba, and the destruction of money…
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