Tag Archives: Germany

"The Germans won't want tariffs on their car exports to the UK", said my father the other day.I have to agree. No-one likes tariffs, especially when they are used to having none. But it was his next comment that made me pause. My father's idea is that the EU will allow the UK to have tariff-free access to the EU's markets after Brexit in order to placate the powerful German car manufacturing lobby. He's not alone in this view: it has been repeatedly stated by Brexit promoters, both during...

The University of Leipzig has recently carried out a survey of 2,240 German people, apparently in an attempt to understand why large numbers of Germans voted for the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the recent state elections back in March of this year.I am unclear whether this can be defended as a large enough and proper representative sample of general opinion, but see here, here, here, here, and here.Amongst their findings is: 50% of those surveyed complained that they...

By William K. BlackMay 1, 2016     Bloomington, MN Republican Party leaders are shocked that their three decades of pursuing the racist “Southern strategy,” California Governor Pete Wilson’s desperate attacks on Latinos, myriad assaults on women’s rights, and repeatedly sponsoring gay bashing propositions designed to energize the (bigoted) base have created a base that champions Donald Trump’s serial hatred.  Key leaders of the hard right in Germany are shocked by the same dynamic.  The...

In response to my post about the lessons of history, Claudia Dias sent me this clip from The Times, March 31st, 1939: Four months after Kristallnacht, and two weeks after Hitler's annexation of Czechoslovakia, the British government was still repatriating Jewish refugees. This group knew they were being sent back to almost certain death. No wonder they were hysterical.Today, refugees in Greece face deportation to Turkey, and from there probable repatriation to their own countries. If they...

Germany's Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaueble has long been critical of ECB monetary policy,. But now, as Reuters says, the gloves are off. In a speech at a prizegiving for an ordoliberal economics foundation last Friday, Dr. Schaeuble demanded that the ECB raise interest rates.The justification? Very low interest rates hurt Germany's savers, which are the bedrock of its economy.There is a political dimension to this. Dr. Schaueble's party, the CDU, is losing popularity and desperate for...

The sun is shining, the daffodils are flowering. Blossom is on the trees. The dark days of winter are behind us: in front of us lies a bright, glowing spring. Black zeros reap golden rewards, it seems.What is all this about? German industrial production has suddenly bounced back from recent falls, rising by 3.3% month-on-month in January 2016. The German statistical agency DEStatis reports that there are particularly strong performances in construction, capital and consumer goods production:...

Revised up but for the worst reasons possible- unsold inventories were higher. Also, consumption expenditures were a bit lower, and note the deceleration of GDP growth on the chart. And in all likelihood Q1 GDP is now being reduced by inventory liquidation substituting for production: GDPHighlightsAn upward revision to inventory growth made for an upward revision to the second estimate of fourth-quarter GDP, to an annualized plus 1.0 percent rate for a 3 tenths increase from the initial...

At Forbes, I have posted the latest episode in the long-running saga of the failure of Hypo Alpe Adria: The story of the failed Austrian bank Hypo Alpe Adria (HAA), and its transformation into the world’s worst “bad bank” – the insolvent HETA – resembles a Hollywood blockbuster. Complete with a cast of thousands, colorful principal characters, an extraordinary range of special (legal) effects and a reach far beyond its national borders, the HETA saga is long, staggeringly expensive,...

My latest post at Forbes takes a close look at Germany's much-praised Sparkassen and their odd relationship with other German banks. It's not quite as it seems.... The German Sparkassen (public savings banks) are widely praised for their stability and their service to German savers and small businesses. They survived the 2008 crisis largely unscathed; the few failures were handled within the network, and depositors were compensated from a fully-funded deposit insurance scheme, with no...

The German economist Wilhelm Lexis (1837–1914) mentions it, quite casually, as a matter of fact in an article in 1895: “Under normal conditions, reductions of wages are in our time almost impossible. Even under the worst conditions, capitalists in many cases prefer to endure a diminution of their profits rather than enter upon a struggle with their organized laborers. How many corporations maintain wages unchanged, even though the stockholders – i.e., the capitalists – get no dividends?”...