Is Apple Ruining Finland's Economy? Don't Believe Everything You Read

The Prime Minister of Finland thinks Apple is ruining his country's economy. At least that's what some writers and bloggers would have you believe.

"I guess one could say that the iPhone killed Nokia  and the iPad killed the Finnish paper industry" Alex Stubb told CNBC in an interview this week. A politician who misspoke, or comments taken out of context?

The remarks come after S&P downgraded Finland's economic outlook from AAA status to AA+, citing reduced exports, a growing population of elderly people and shrinking workforce among the reasons. S&P had previously warned the Finnish government a downgrade was in the works, if it didn't take further steps towards improving the economy with more structural reforms. In a statement, Alex Stubb called S&P's decision "unfortunate but not surprising", leaving Finland alone among its Nordic neighbour Sweden, Norway and Denmark without a coveted AAA status.

This is not the first time the Finnish Prime Minister has seemingly taken a swipe at Apple. "Steve Jobs took our jobs" he is quoted telling a Swedish newspaper in July, in an interview that highlighted how hard Finland's traditional paper and tech industries had fallen in recent times. "But this is beginning to change,” Stubb told Dagens Industri. “Our forestry is slowly but surely shifting from paper to bioenergy. Our IT industry is moving towards gaming, it’s not just about hardware like the Nokia mobiles" he explained.

In a pre-iPhone world, Nokia ruled. The Finnish economy prospered and grew to one of the strongest in the world. Finns enjoyed more than a decade of unprecedented wealth and high standards of living. The fairytale did not last. Nokia failed to move fast enough to keep up with more popular operating systems and handsets, and after a series of catastrophic job cuts and losses, the once-great Finnish company's mobile phone business was bought by Microsoft for the bargain basement price of $7billion last year.

Of course Alex Stubb's comments about Apple ignited a swift reaction in the tech industry media. "If in doubt, blame someone else" said TechCrunch, below a headline that said Stubb "can't stop blaming Apple for Finland's economic woes".  In the end, TechCruch concluded that "citing Apple for past problems is lame and weak-looking".

Now 46-year old Stubb, who heads a four-party coalition government, is hitting back. The ever-tweeting Prime Minister (he's got close to 150,000 followers, and updates them on the weather and his exercise regime, amid tweets about government policies) called the TechCrunch story "skewed" and lamented that he was "baffled" how the original interview had been spun.

For Stubb, a media-friendly Prime Minister well versed in the arts of social media spin, it's a surprising misstep. But mounting political pressure at home, and a worsening economic situation could be a factor. In an interview with Bloomberg this week, Stubb conceded “the alarm bells have been ringing for a long time, but the government hasn’t taken that seriously enough".

This week he'll meet with opposition politicians to try to find some consensus moving forward, on how all the parties can work together to fix Finland's broken economy.