Finland is shaking. According to some ("industry" and other sources), Cisco Systems is considering buying Nokia, the world's largest mobile phone company. Rumors of this have been around before but this time it made the nine o'clock news.

And it made people worried.

I suppose it's natural because even if Nokia's shareholders are already mostly foreign, non-Finnish that is, the management has been Finnish and will continue to be so and it's headquartered in Finland.

And: Nokia alone is responsible for one fifth of the corporate taxes paid in the country and there are hundreds, if not thousands of companies directly dependent on Nokia. According to some estimates, Nokia represents about 3.5 percent of Finland's gross domestic product and nearly 25 percent of all exports.

One fifth of all corporate taxes. That pays for a lot of social security, my friends.

This Cisco talk may turn out to be just pure speculation, but it gave many people a scare. Even if "sisko" means "sister" in Finnish.