Tag archive for ‘Germany’
Eat the poor – Germany’s austerity package
Today the German government passed key measures in its austerity package first announced back in June. The stated aim is to ensure compliance with the bizarre new constitutional clause – the so-called debt-brake – requiring a balanced (structural) budget by 2016 at the latest and to get below the Maastricht 3% deficit limit by 2013. [...]
Angela Merkel: The World’s ‘Most Valuable Leader’
Forget Barack Obama. Forget the Hu Jintao/Wen Jiaboa duo, or David Cameron or Vladimir Putin. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel is the world’s most important leader. The latest report showing Germany’s economy growing at a blistering annual rate of nearly 9%, well into recovery from a US-made economic collapse, is just further evidence of the obvious. Despite [...]
A Year of Missed Opportunities for the EU
In politics it is August rather than January when people look back at the last year and take stock of what has or has not been achieved. Hence, as I have been soaking up the Spanish sun, my mind has been replaying events from the last twelve months. Last summer, I had great optimism for [...]
European Economic Governance Madness
Euractiv reported about a new Franco-German declaration to the task force charged with working up a mechanism of economic governance for the EU/Eurozone. Completely ignorant about the ongoing debates about how counterproductive early fiscal austerity could be the document states: Member States would be expected to enact national laws that formalise the public finance recovery [...]
Method in our Budget Madness?
Why has the general public bought into the TINA (There Is No Alternative) deficit reduction story? And what about our political class? Cameron, Clegg and Cable have allegedly ‘seen the light’ and emerged convinced that Britain needs huge cuts to stave off disaster. Brown and Darling differed only with respect to the timing of deficit [...]
Double-Dip Days
The global economy, artificially boosted since the recession of 2008-2009 by massive monetary and fiscal stimulus and financial bailouts, is headed towards a sharp slowdown this year as the effect of these measures wanes. Worse yet, the fundamental excesses that fueled the crisis – too much debt and leverage in the private sector (households, banks [...]
A European Economic Government Could Solve Europe’s Democracy Deficit
Europe has come to praise democracy and is about to bury it. The Greek crisis, caused by the uncooperative behaviour of different nation states, has been a wake-up call showing that monetary union without an economic government will not work in the long run. Reforms are needed. Yet, because they widen the democratic deficit, the [...]
Competitiveness through Cuts?
A standard piece of textbook economics is that if a country cannot devalue, it must cut real wages to increase labour productivity and make its exports more attractive. Indeed, it is argued quite plausibly that the main reasons for Germany’s successful export performance in the past decade is that real wages have remained flat, despite [...]
Economic Crisis Provides Opportunity for Greater ‘Europeanisation’ of Defence Spending
As governments outdo each other to cut their budgets, one area that ought to be ripe for pruning is defence. After all, the combined EU member states defence spending is 200 billion euros, the second largest in the world after the USA. Room then, one would think, for big savings. Naturally, defence is a very [...]
Germany’s Europe Deficit
Germany used to be at the heart of European integration. Its statesmen used to assert that Germany had no independent foreign policy, only a European policy. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, its leaders realized that German reunification was possible only in the context of a united Europe, and they were willing to make [...]
Europe’s Policymakers are rushing towards the Edge of the Cliff
Lemmings are cute, family-oriented, apparently well-adjusted creatures who, most of the time, live more or less happily in the tundra. Although it is an urban myth that they commit collective suicide to control population, they certainly experience periodic mass frenzies. Driven by some deeply rooted instinctive yearning, they swarm off in search of salvation, looking [...]
Who lost Europe?
Financial meltdown has been averted in Europe – for now. But the future of the European Union and the fate of the eurozone still hang in the balance. If Europe doesn’t find a way to reactivate the continent’s economy soon, it will be doomed to years of gloom and endless mutual recrimination about “who sabotaged [...]
