In Portugal the numbers are all bad:

The deficit is 9.1 percent of GDP. The economy is expected to contract by anywhere between 3.1 and 5 percent this year. It took a bailout from the EU, ECB, IMF "troika" of 78 billion euros ($102.6 billion) and will have a hard time paying it back because its credit rating is now "junk." Five year bond yields yesterday broke a record: 18.9 percent. Three year bond yields hit 21 percent.

Oh, and unemployment stands at a record 13.2 percent.

Davos. The name, the place, what it stands for is a challenge to an ideal of journalism. It seems to be one of those events that become a story not because of any intrinsic news value but because a bunch of famous people get together and allow journalists to mingle among them.

There are many national leaders at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos but no treaties are signed, nor are there joint declarations of policy made. That would be news and worth reporting. There are titans of industry in Davos, but no products are launched or companies acquired. That, too, would be news etc.

It can't be news because the comments about the year to come actually shape events. I came across this article from The Washington Post a couple of years ago on Google about some famously wrong predictions made by the rulers of the planet at the World Economic Forum. It's pretty amusing. (For that matter, did anyone at Davos in 1996 or 97 predict there would be something like Google (founded in 1998) and that a search engine would upend all previously known models of information aggregation and dissemination?

Anyway, the leaders are at Davos, journalists are tweeting like fan-boys and girls about rubbing shoulders with them. 

Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond chose Burns Night, the national celebration of Scotland's greatest poet, to publish a consultation paper, "Your Scotland, Your Referendum," which is the first step of the legislative process that will lead, ultimately to a vote in autumn 2014 on Scottish independence.

Austerity cuts seems to be the theme of my blog posts today. Heavily indebted European governments need to "deleverage," as the current buzz word has it, but how far and, crucially, how fast?

In Britain, despite warnings from the opposition Labour Party about the pace and size of cuts doing more harm than good, Britain's Conservative-led coalition government has reduced the size of government spending with abandon. Predictably Prime Minister David Cameron's austerity program has landed the country on the door-step of a double-dip recession. The economy contracted in the last quarter of 2011 by 0.2 percent.

At Prime Minister's Question Time today, Cameron contemptuously swatted away criticism from Labour leader Ed Miliband. But that is party politics. The IMF's chief economist Olivier Blanchard is no left-wing politician and he told the BBC today it would be wise for Cameron and his Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne to slow down the pace of the cuts.