Swedish Property Prices take Big Hit
Who knew? Prices in the Swedish housing market is falling faster than anywhere in Europe. A drop of 17% in December alone after taking a similar tumble in the fall
Notice we said Europe. “The Swedish forecast is second only to Canada’s, where Oxford Economics has forecast a 30pc peak-to-trough fall, but the remarkable thing about Sweden is the speed of change,” writes the Daily Telegraph in London.
The Swedes are up to the eyeballs in debt. And like the rest of the world, interest rates are up to fight inflation. Especially housing prices. The average Swedish household owes 203% of disposable income, the highest in the rich world. Thirty Swedes? Nope.
Brits and Europeans saved by the Weather God. Up Yours Vladimir.
On Sunday morning it was 7 celsius in London and the wind was blowing at thirty kilometres an hour. Wind on December 30 produced a record amount of electricity. In 2022 wind supplied 26.8% of Britain’s electricity, second only to natural gas.
While the Russians are trying to freeze the Europeans out, warm weather and wind is saving their bacon. Temperatures in Berlin are double the seasonal average.
And Paris is positively balmy.
Who does inflation hurt?
Checking this chart it looks as if inflation hits the middle income slice of the American population hard and even more father down the income scale. All the big increases — except for airline fares— affect the average person. Send your kid to school to buy lunch and it costs a bomb. Making a sandwich is a third more than it was a year ago. Even taking the bus to work is up by a third.
India: the rising star
India just bumped Britain in the GDP sweepstakes. It has a long way to go to catch up with China economically, but its current population of 1.4-billion people will soon overtake China. The New York Times ran a piece 9 days ago saying the War in Ukraine is helping India. “Russia’s War Could Make it India’s World”.
India continues to import cheap Russian oil and it isn’t giving in to Western sanctions.
“Since February, Europe has imported six times more fossil fuel energy from Russia than India has done,” says S. Jaishankar, India’s Foreign Minister in the Times piece. “So if a $60,000-per-capita society feels it needs to look after itself, and I accept that as legitimate, they should not expect a $2,000-per-capita society to take a hit,”
India is benefitting from the COVID epidemic in China, the crackdown in Hong Kong and the totalitarian nature of the Chinese government. Technology firms are moving away from China and to India, where its education system has produced a work force of tens of millions of tech-savvy workers.
India hopes that by 2030 it will be the third largest economy in the world, behind only the United States and China.
The Elgin Marbles
The British government is in talks about the possible return of the Elgin Marbles, according to an article in this month’s edition of History Today.
The Elgin Marbles at the British Museum in 1981. History Today.
“The Marbles were removed from Athens and shipped to England on the initiative of Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, who served as British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire between 1799 and 1803. At first, they were publicly exhibited in a private house on Park Lane. They attracted the interest of various potential buyers, Napoleon among them. At the invitation of the trustees of the British Museum, however, Lord Elgin chose to offer them to the British government in return for a reimbursement high enough to meet his current debt,” writes History Today.
Greek governments and sympathetic Brits have long lobbied for the Elgin Marbles to be returned to Greece. There was agitation by British writers and politicians during the Second World War to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece, in recognition of the country’s brave fight against the Italians and Germans. During the war the Elgin Marbles were moved from the British Museum and stored underground in the unused Aldwych Tube station.
The Acropolis Museum in Athens, completed in 2007, has a space allowed for the return of the Elgin Marbles. It looks as the artwork will indeed be returned to Greece this year.
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One reason there is there a Shortage of Doctors
Organizations run by doctors work hard to keep out family doctors and specialists. I am writing a book about a doctor right now and I interviewed a doctor who moved here from India with her husband, who works in finance. There is one bureaucratic hurdle after another. She is working as a receptionist in a clinic while patients wait to see a doctor because the rules are keeping them out.
When Doctors act Like a Medieval Guild
Lunch with my daughter Kate
Essay of the Week
The Fokker D.VII was the most advanced operational German fighter of the Great War. There are only seven of these aircraft left in the world and the most original, unspoiled example is in the Brome Country Historical Society in the rural village of Knowlton, Quebec, south of Montreal near the border with Vermont.
The plane sits in an unheated wooden building with no air conditioning. That is one reason it is in such good shape; another is that no one has mucked with it apart from a Royal Canadian Air Force servicing in 1963.
The Fokker D.VII entered the war in 1918. Manfred von Richthofen test flew an early D.VII but was killed before it entered active service. Two future Nazi leaders flew it in combat: Herman Goering and Rudolf Hess. The D.VII only flew in the last few months of World War One, but it shot down 565 Allied aircraft in the latter part of 1918.
There were planes which were faster, but the advanced construction meant the plane was aerobatic and could take stress that other planes of the day could not. It also could fly higher, an advantage when attacking from above.
The plane had an advanced cantilevered wing that made it easier to fly, according to Edward Soye, a Canadian historian and pilot who has studied the D.VII. He has flown replicas of the Fokker Triplane, but not the D.VII.
By the end of the war there were about 800 D.VIIs left and the victors wanted them. It was the only weapon of war singled out by name in section IV of the Armistice of November 11, 1918.
“Surrender in good condition by the German Armies of the following war material: 5,000 guns (2,500 heavy, 2,500 field). 25,000 machine guns. 3,000 trench mortars. 1,700 fighting and bombing aeroplanes-in the first place, all D7's and all night-bombing aeroplanes.”.
The Dominion of Canada felt its contribution to the war effort justified its own share of war booty. It received more than two dozen D.VIIs, along with artillery pieces, machine guns and other German military booty. Some of those D.VIIs, along with British aircraft, flew in the first Canadian Fighter Squadron, formed in Britain in late 1918. Plane number 6810/18, the one in the Knowlton museum, was part of that squadron.
The planes were shipped to Hounslow then Chingford in Essex where they were crated for shipment to Canada. They arrived in Toronto in May of 1919. Sir Arthur Doughty, the Dominion of Canada Archivist and Director of War Trophies, distributed all war booty. Some of the planes went to universities to be studied, and Canadian pilots including Victoria Cross winners, Billy Bishop and William Barker, flew others in airshows. Three of the aircraft did formation aerobatics and mock dogfights at the Canadian National Exhibition at Toronto in September of 1919.
Another D.VII was put on static display at the Exhibition, along with a Junkers J 1, an all-metal monoplane that is still on exhibit at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.
The Fokker D.VII made it to the Knowlton museum because of a local politician, Senator George Foster, who had been deputy prime minister at one point during the war and whose son won a DFC. The Fokker arrived on May 27, 1920, with the Canadian Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden giving a speech marking its arrival in Foster's hometown.
The small museum is snowbound for at least four months a year. There were only 1,400 visitors last year and only about 100 who came just to the Fokker D.VII. The Brome County Historical Society is always short of cash and some of its board members wanted to sell the plane. One local antique dealer even contacted an auction house in New York who hinted there could be private buyers in Germany willing to pay more than a million dollars for an unrestored Fokker D.VII.
The Canadian government pointed out it owns the aircraft and it is not the museum’s to sell. Even if it were bought, the plane might not survive a move. One museum director in Ottawa said it was madness to consider getting rid of the museum’s most valuable artifact.
The Canadian Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa sent a team of technicians to judge the plane's condition a few years ago. They wanted to find out if the plane could survive a transfer to a new home. The verdict was the aircraft was well adapted to its environment and should stay in rural Quebec.
It wasn’t the first time the museum talked about a sale. Howard Hughes, the American industrialist, airman and Hollywood producer, wanted to buy Knowlton's Fokker D.VII for his 1930 First World War air epic, Hell's Angels. The museum's board said no, though another Canadian D.VII was used in the film.
There are seven remaining D.VIIs. The RAF Museum in Hendon has one and it has been restored. There is one in Ottawa that has been partially restored. It is one of the planes used in the Howard Hughes film. The Smithsonian in Washington has one that has been restored. Mr Soye says there are original pieces in a box that have been replaced in the aircraft. There is a D.VII in Munich, the only one in Germany, another in France at le Bourget and an aircraft in Fokker’s home country, the Netherlands.
“All have been heavily restored except for the 6810-18 in Knowlton. It is the only unrestored Fokker D.VII in the world. It is a priceless relic of the First World War,” said Mr. Soye who wrote his master’s thesis at the Royal Military College of Canada on trophies from the First World War. “People change all sorts of things on these aircraft in the course of a restoration. We have at looked at six of these seven aircraft very closely as part of a project to build a flying replica. We found all sorts of things that were done post war.”
Perhaps the one thing that makes the Knowlton D.VII unique is that it still has the original fabric from its manufacture in 1918. Many of the others have original looking fabric, but it has been re-created.