Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

There are a number of great links today.  Yves has done a stellar job today.  I recommend you go over and take a look.  The stories about how capitalist is the U.S. economy, the great speedup and especially the shale gas emails are all interesting.  I figured I would highlight Germany's season of angst: why a prosperous nation is turning on itself, at the Globe and Mail, since Germany is key to the survival or failure of the Euro, and I always want to find out more about the place:

Here in the industrial core of Europe, things have never been so good.
Germany's western flank has become the greatest exporter in the Western world, second only to China and far ahead of the United States. The container ports along the Rhine are working day and night to deliver record orders of German products to southern and western Europe, the U.S. and especially to China. Shops are busy. Home sales are rocking. Unemployment hasn't been so low since the eighties. In terms of growth, profits and productivity, the current German economic boom has surpassed even the “wonder years” of the 1950s. These are, by several measures, the most successful people in the world.
Yet it is very hard to find anyone here who is happy about this state of affairs. Unlike the great Rhineland industrial booms of the 1950s and 1970s, this one is provoking Germans to turn against their government, against Europe, against technology and growth, against outsiders. It is an inward-looking, self-questioning moment in a country that the rest of Europe very badly needs to be involved in affairs outside its borders.
If previous German booms were marked with a national mood of confidence and optimism, this is a prosperity of angst and fear: According to one survey, 80 per cent of Germans now believe that the future will be worse than the present, that “everything is getting worse.” There is an entire consulting industry devoted to analyzing the “national angst.”
“What we're repeatedly finding is that, despite the very good economic data, there is a huge amount of unease and uncertainty,” says Stephan Grünewald, a Cologne-based psychologist who recently interviewed 7,000 citizens for his book Germany on the Couch. “There is a manifest crisis of trust. … The Germans have at the moment a mood, a feeling that things can go to pieces, a feeling of being in a situation in which one is completely incapable of action.”

Maybe that is pop psychology, but the article goes over some interesting anecdotal evidence of German unease.  Their position on the southern European debt situation will determine the fate of the Euro, and it will be one of, if not the major story of 2011-2012 for the world economy.