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froylein

13 Comments

  • Who cares. The Euro was artificially inflated from the start for political reasons. We may have a dipping economy, but at least we’re not debating introducing Sharia law and banning Israelis from our country. I’ll take a weak economy and common sense over a strong economy but a doomed collectivist culture, at least a weak economy is easier to turn around. 🙂 Besides, a lower dollar encourages foreign investment, while I’m not looking at setting any offices up in Europe at the time, that’s for sure.

  • Which of the Euro countries is debating introducing Sharia laws and banning Israelis? The Brits still enjoy their “splendid isolation”, monetarily as well. A lower dollar certainly encourages foreign investment – but also in cheap labour countries that bill in dollars.

  • thanks alex. just one more reason to hate europeans, if not for their great fashion sense.

    france? turkey? one of the eastern european nations! i’ll bet my bar mitzvah account. (there’s not much left since ps3 came out)

  • The problem is that 1 Euro doesn’t buy you much in Europe – which is a bad thing for he export business. A lot of European products cannot compete anymore on the US market, so companies have already begun to off-shore production and service to non-Euro countries.
    The high Euro is quite good for contract IT-guys like me who don’t live in Europe but have European customers. Anyway I found it very hard to find work with European companies in the last couple of month. There isn’t exactly an abundance of optimism, despite positive forecasts.

  • I’d like to add my own personal Homer Simpson-like “WOO HOO!” to the chorus, as another lucky duck who gets paid in Euros. It is truly unbelievably awesome.

  • David, depends on what you want to buy and where. Just going by the numbers after / before the currency symbol, food is about one third of the price compared to the U.S., petrol is more expensive as taxes on it are higher (at the moment it’s about $1.40 per litre), general clothing is cheaper here, but certain brands are cheaper in the US. I don’t know how that compares to Israel though.
    Since I’ve got a lot of friends that studied something IT-related, I can tell you that the problem with finding jobs in the IT market isn’t all to be blamed on the Euro or outsourcing, but that during a period of low availability of IT professionals, college grads were encouraged to pursue IT studies, more and more universities opened IT departments, average computer literacy increased alongside user-friendliness etc., so there are more IT folks than currently needed. During the beginning of my studies (my university had a large IT department), I still saw headhunters of big companies coming to lecture halls and hiring second-semester students right out of class, often even offering them tenure and incredible wages by today’s standards, but now IT students acually, ack, need to apply for jobs. Unlike many other jobs, where sound cognition and production skills of the language of the land are a must, many IT companies communicate more than less in English, which makes it easier to hire foreign staff, but companies must provide evidence that a native employee wouldn’t be able to fulfil the requirements of that specific job. And if larger companies try to move jobs abroad through sub contractors, they aim right for those countries where wages are considerably lower and only get free lancers for those jobs the staff in, let’s say, India can’t do.

  • Children should not play with coins no matter what the currency is. The again, they should apparently not play with Chinese toys either…