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A surprisingly strong report on German industrial output in March has helped the euro gain ground on the dollar and yen. Markets were caught off guard by a positive German economic indicator for the second day in a row.

Output jumped by 1.2 per cent on the month in March - beating even the highest forecast of 0.8 per cent in a Reuters poll -after an upwardly revised 0.6 per cent increase in February as factories churned out more goods and energy production rose.

German industry grows in March as economy gears up slowly

“German industry has entered the current quarter with a lot of momentum,” said Heinrich Bayer, an economist at Deutsche Postbank AG in Bonn. “We expect a strong pickup in growth this quarter after a 0.2 percent increase in gross domestic product in the first quarter.”

The German economy is in better shape than many others in the 17-strong group of European Union countries that use the euro and is believed to have returned to growth in the first quarter. It shrank slightly in last year's final three months, which Schaeuble cited as the main reason for the lower tax revenue forecast.

Read more here: http://www.thenewstribune.com/2013/05/08/2588972/german-industrial-production-rises.html#storylink=cpy

The last two German states to charge tuition fees, Bavaria and Lower Saxony, are expected to abolish them in the coming months, making Germany an outlier amid a global trend toward the introduction and increase of tuition fees.

The Bavarian parliament is expected to scrap university tuition fees. The Social Democrat-Green government in Lower Saxony means tuition fees will be phased out in that state by 2014. On the contrary, over $2 billion has been scrapped from an already struggling university sector.

The German Education Union argues that higher education is a human right -- a belief enshrined in the United Nations’ International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

Among the 34 members of the OECD, a club of rich nations, it is estimated there are 26m youths not in education, employment or training (so-called NEETs). Germany, which has a relatively low level of youth unemployment, places a lot of emphasis on high-quality vocational courses, apprenticeships and links with industry. But it is an exception.

Despite the enmity often directed at Berlin for its insistence on painful austerity as the cure for Europe's sovereign-debt crisis, Germany has become a new land of opportunity for tens of thousands of people fleeing their recession-racked homelands . Language barriers, rigid German labor laws and the reluctance of some German firms to hire foreigners remain impediments, some analysts say.

Germany has managed to avoid the Ponzi economic growth paradigm and is gaining economic and educational success on a declining and ageing population. Australia should take a lesson from Germany's example.

If we truly understand the importance of the forest, then we would know that a forestless world could spell doom for man. And so, we would make every effort to guard against the destruction of our forest resources.

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Editorial comment: Thank you for the supportive comment. In general, we don't allow links to sites which contain a lot of advertising. The site linked to above includes a number of advertisements. The site's principle contents are 'authentic Indian recipes' for what appear to be very succulent dishes, although we cannot vouch for the claims that these dishes are healthy and nutritious.

The federal budget will lay down a path to surplus despite the hit to revenues from the high Australian dollar and the end of the mining investment boom, Treasurer Wayne Swan says. Prime Minister Julia Gillard warned on Monday that revenue for 2012/13 was expected to be $12 billion less.

It's believed the government decided to introduce the special tax, which effectively takes the 1.5 per cent Medicare levy to 2.0 per cent, following an expenditure review committee meeting on Tuesday. The current Government rakes in substantially less tax as a proportion of the economy than its predecessors. The "prosperity" promised from record levels of population growth aren't providing fruition.

Too many people are getting too many benefits they don’t need because successive governments have tried to buy their votes. The health and welfare systems have been used as political tools, not safety nets.

Read more:

The handout blowout that's costing the budget

... by Alan Kohler, 7 hours ago (i.e approx 5.55PM, 1 May 2013) at http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2013/5/1/politics/handout-blowout-thats-costing-budget

"Too many people" is due to 23 million people expanding the demand for resources.

The government struggles to contain a ballooning budget deficit as the strong revenue flows during the first phase of the resources boom are over.

The Australian economy grew around or just below average pace last year. NDIS, changes to carbon pricing, dental funding, offshore processing of asylum seekers and educational reforms are all very expensive items.

Australia’s population reached 11.5 million in 1966 and so it has taken less than 47 years to double to 23 million. Our country continues to grow at the fastest rate in the developed world.

Why don't our government, and economists, question the monetary and financial implications of funding this rapid growth rate? This growth demands vital infrastructure projects, education, welfare and health care, and we have a projected $12 billion budget "hole". Our economic and jobs growth slow-down since 2010 has been matched with increasing immigration levels.

We live in a finite world, so we can't grow forever. Our huge population is going to become an economic and ecological liability one way or another, and its doubtful it will be needed in the future centuries with the growth of technology, and the slow-down of the resources boom.

Our Ponzi economic growth model is unravelling at the seams, evidenced by debts, budget short-falls, cutbacks, increasing costs of living and lowering living standards.

Please add further comments here - Ed, 1 May 2013.

[This comment originally posted on ROEOZ list. Identifyers removed. Hope that is okay.]

Wayne Swann recently gave $2.5 million to further a study into
the Pentland Project, Bob Katter's pet idea.

Major dam proposal gets a boost of 13 April

The project is to dam the upper Burdekin at Hell's Gate,
pipe the water to the Pentland area
and use it for irrigating 120,000 ha of sugarcane,
a new sugar mill producing sugar, molasses and bagasse,
turning the molasses into "green" ethanol fuel,
burning the bagasse to produce "green" electricity,
much needed by the mining industry in the Galilee Basin.

What they didn't say was:
It is dry tropical savannah country with occasional flooding,
so when you remove the trees and grasses, and plough the land,
it blows away on the wind and is washed away during floods,
it needs massive amounts of water and fertiliser,
which also washes and leaches away,
and nice juicy sugarcane will attract plagues of pests,
from locusts to mice and feral pigs.

And 120,000 ha of sugarcane will only produce enough bagasse
to run the mill and put 40 MW into the grid, 21 weeks of the year.
So the 800 MW power station they are talking about
isn't going to be powered by bagasse.
Guess what it IS going to be powered by ...
yes, that's right, 97% COAL and 3% bagasse.

And where are the cane farmers going to come from?
Where are they going to live?
Where are they going to shop?
What roads are they going to drive on ?

Hopefully this is just a sop to Katter to get his preferences,
and when it is studied, they'll then know that it doesn't stack up,
but that won't be till after the election.

Lebanese Caretaker Interior Minister Marwan Charbel warned Saturday that his country could no longer absorb the influx of Syrian refugees.

He asked that the burden [of assisting them] be distributed among states on the basis of collective responsibility because "Lebanon has exceeded its ability to absorb them."

18,000 people registered with their agency over the past week, with the total number of registered refugees rising to 428,000.

Western imperialism has created a human tsunami of suffering in Syria. The suffering in Lebanon, where most of the Syrian refugees have fled, seems particularly acute. In one month, and with the current funding, more than 400,000 Syrian refugees in Lebanon will no longer receive food assistance. Lebanon expects there to be more than 1.2 million Syrian refugees by the end of the year.

The UN refugee coordinator noted that the thousands of refugees have also burdened the already deteriorating economic situation in the country by putting "pressure on the labour market and [causing a] rise in inflation" rates.

The refugees find shelter in private homes — sometimes the landlord chooses not to collect rent. Families sleep in old schools, and in at least this one case, in a former jail. Lebanon has seen its population swell by about 10 per cent since the Syrian crisis began more than two years ago.

The rich Muslim nations do nothing in all this. It is always the west that has to come through with aid. Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates had each pledged $300 million for the humanitarian needs of refugees and it was hoped these would arrive soon.

More evidence of Ponzi economic is our cut-backs to university funding of $2.3 billion to pay for State education.

It's not really funding, but cutting one educational sector to pay for another. It's really money-shuffling, taking from one already starved sector to pay for what should be available to another.
Ms Gillard always praised her chance to have a university education, had cut her teeth in student politics when she became president of what was then the Australian Union of Students as a Melbourne University student in 1983.

National Union of Students tweeted "@JuliaGillard as a former student activist and representative how can you justify slashing one part of education for another?" How many of our politicians enjoyed free, if not cheap tertiary education, just to put the screws on opportunities for this generation of prospective students?

University cuts give Labor member bitter taste of irony

The Federal government cut would result in losses of about $100 million in research funding, an estimated further $15m in infrastructure funding and $50.4m in teaching support at the university over the next four years.

The education industry would then be forced to rely more on international students, and increase the already unwieldy fees.

Our economy has become over-sized, unfathomable, unsustainable and cumbersome. It has created its own momentum - to gather more "economic growth" and this means losing control of what our economy is all about!

If the future of our young people is jeopardized by not being ready and educated for the 21st century, then the economy has developed a "mind of its own" and has lost the purpose of what it was supposed to do in the first place - provide for the people, the citizens, who are part of it. That means trading goods and services for high standards of living, working and high standards of education.
If our economy fails when debts become oversized, it becomes self-feeding and counterproductive.

The Ponzi pyramid serves the sharks, the elite, the high-rollers at the top, but further down the victims are being deprived of economic and social benefits.

This "funding" is simply moving around funds from existing budgets, and spitting out people - those nearer to the pyramid's bottom get more and more deprived and impoverished.

Does Ellen Brown have any advice about what ordinary people might do to prevent loss of their savings if governments and banks start making moves on accounts outside Europe, similar to what has happened in Cyprus? Should we all just convert everything to gold and bury it somewhere?

Editorial comment: You could consider posting part of the above question to Ellen Brown's twitter page, as I have already done. if you can compose a message no larger than twitter's limit of 140 characters per messsage. Your post would look something like:

@ellenhbrown http://candobetter.net/?q=node/3213#comment-32385 Does Ellen Brown have any advice about what ordinary people might do ...