7 ms·

The single market is looking wobbly

50 points by ivanvas 4y ago

enlyth 4y ago
https://archive.ph/7ORCZ https://archive.ph/7ORCZ
chrisseaton 4y ago
> The single market is looking wobbly Note that the Economist is British.
- secondcoming 4y ago
  And?
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    I wonder what motivation the British could have for saying that the EU's single market is looking wobbly?
    - secondcoming 4y ago
      The Economist isn't a mouthpiece for the UK government.
      - donedealomg 4y ago
        Or the majority of the voters
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - luckydata 4y ago
      I don't know about the economist but there's certain stipulations that went into the foundation of the single currency that favored Germany heavily, and Germany behaved the whole time like it didn't happen. Most of the european resentment comes from that fact. Most southern european countries were taken for a ride during those negotiations, and have paid (and continue to) a steep price. I was a strong believer in the common currency but after reading about it for a while I'm not convinced it was a good idea anymore - if you're anyone except Germany or France. Paul Krugman wrote at length about why that was a mistake, and he was 100% right about it.
      - manu_te 4y ago
        France hasn't really benefited much. Italy has been the talking point for a long time and rightly so for the amount of debt plus the chronic political instability, but France is very much on a similar decline path. Edit: cheap Russian gas + high productivity + political stability + undervalued currency (the Deutsche mark would have been way stronger than the euro) is what fueled German dominance in Europe. Italy/France/Spain/Greece/Portugal all struggled with varying degrees with low productivity, political instability (apart from France) and a currency that was too strong for their macro-economic fundamentals.
        mytailorisrich 4y ago
        France has a talent for self-harm although they are not the only ones. Ultimately, Germany succeeded better because they acted better and more productively.
        tkk23 4y ago
        To spell it out: >President François Mitterrand argued for the single currency because he hoped to bolster French influence in an EU that would otherwise fall under the sway of a unified Germany https://www.economist.com/leaders/2012/11/17/the-time-bomb-at-the-heart-of-europe https://www.economist.com/leaders/2012/11/17/the-time-bomb-a...
      - chalst 4y ago
    - deadbeefpatty 4y ago
      This seems suspiciously close to an ad-hominem argument. The Economist is pro single market and advocated for remain (https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/02/27/the-brexit-delusion https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/02/27/the-brexit-del...)
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - YawningAngel 4y ago
      What motivation could we have? Most British people you talk to on the internet are distinctly unhappy about Brexit and, if anything, are motivated to talk up the single market
      - chrisseaton 4y ago
        > Most British people you talk to on the internet are distinctly unhappy about Brexit Most voted for it. If you're in a vacuum chamber that's your problem.
        ggm 4y ago
        > Most voted for it. Of those who voted, a very small majority voted for it. By no means most British voters voted for it. A reprise of the vote now would not secure the same outcome.
        YawningAngel 4y ago
        You'll be surprised to learn that the British people you talk to on the Internet are not sampled uniformly from the general population
        andyjohnson0 4y ago
        ~37% of the electorate voted for it, six years ago. If you think it has become more popular in the intervening time then it may be that you're in the echo chamber.
    - netsharc 4y ago
      Believing different entities to be similar because they share one property in common is very convenient, but is very unintelligent...
- HL33tibCe7 4y ago
  But also note that the Economist is reliable factually, relatively unbiased, and is in general respected in the UK and further afield for both of those things. Its coverage of Brexit and EU matters more generally is usually balanced, and probably leans towards remain/EU if anything.
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    > the Economist is reliable factually, relatively unbiased, and is in general respected in the UK and further afield ... coverage of Brexit and EU matters more generally is usually balanced, and probably leans towards remain/EU if anything Hmmm....
yrgulation 4y ago
“In case anyone felt their nose insufficiently rubbed in German success” All good things come to an end. Also it feels like if the weather will suck tomorrow it will be blamed on germany. Where are the other countries in all this? Taking a nap?
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  Germany was a huge winner from introduction of the Euro. Some other countries, especially the Latin bloc, cannot cope with the common currency. (Ironically, it was the German economists who used to be very skeptical against the common currency and were loud about it.) At the end of the day, the single market will only be popular if growth and prosperity are shared across the continent. If the economic periphery plagued by anemic growth and high debt burden expands, so will populist sentiments. And the economic periphery of the EU is already rather sizeable - even the former GDR could be counted in it, at least when looking at the structural unemployment and migration patterns of young qualified people. In the US, Trump won his mandate riding on a wave of such populist sentiments from the Rust Belt. In Europe, ethno-national differences run much deeper than interstate differences in America, so the end result may be a fatal split in the Union.
  - mmarq 4y ago
    The Latin block (Southern Europe??) countries joined the euro to cut their interest rates, and that happened. The periphery is poor because it has been ruled by embarrassing governments for decades.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - harperlee 4y ago
      And in turn saw their industry unable to compete with the German one as deutsche marks stopped relatively appreciating with every german export. By the way they didn’t just join for that, so obviously saying “don’t complain! You got what you asked for” doesn’t really make sense as an argument.
durnygbur 4y ago
"capital has no nationality", then of course any capital excesses will trickle down just any time...
guerrilla 4y ago
> Imagine queuing up at a food bank only for a millionaire to rock up in a BMW and announce he is snapping up the entire supply of grub Except it's not a like foodbank; it's literally a market and this is the cost of markets and the reason many socialists oppose them.
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  > State-aid rules were suspended during covid-19, as national governments bailed out everything from airlines to pizzerias. This is anything but a free market, and the consequences thereof. Actually a very good analogy for NGEU program.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    As if industrial capitalists play fair. "Free markets" live in textbooks.
    - Proven 4y ago
      [dead]
zublet 4y ago
Another round of blaming Germany! I guess after the Nord Stream sabotage they need another issue. The whole of Europe took gas from Russia, but Nord Stream was the incarnation of evil. The press was full of Nord Stream articles and never mentioned the other pipelines. Poland took gas well into May 2022, and only stopped after Russia demanded payment in rubles. The Yamal pipeline is still standing. Europe still gets Russian gas via the Ukraine transit pipelines. So apparently the issue is that there must not be a direct connection between Germany and Russia, so the transit states have leverage. What does Poland do itself? It routes the new pipeline from Norway via Denmark and the sea, avoiding transit via Germany. Perhaps Germany should leave the EU like Britain if it is so horrible.
- donedealomg 4y ago
- 14u2c 4y ago
  > Poland took gas well into May 2022, and only stopped after Russia demanded payment in rubles. True, but Germany did the opposite and started buying the gas with rubles. It's no surprise that this caused some animosity.
  - zapperdulchen 4y ago
    I think that's misinformation. Do you have a credible source for this? Here is mine: Gas only for rubles: is Germany also threatened with a delivery stop? [https://www-br-de.translate.goog/nachrichten/deutschland-welt/gas-nur-gegen-rubel-droht-auch-deutschland-ein-lieferstopp,T4DH71Y?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-br-de.translate.goog/nachrichten/deutschland-wel...]
- midislack 4y ago
  Just have the pipelines blown up. It's easy, everybody's doing it.
juusto 4y ago
If I had one euro for every time The Economist has said that the Euro/EU were wobbly/breaking/etc I could balance Liz Truss'es budget and have money left for some fish'n'chips.
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  This kind of ad-hominem happens on every Economist thread here. First order of business is to take a jab at the Economist. That just means factual things are being reported and people don't want to confront reality.
  - KerrAvon 4y ago
    The Economist lost a lot of credibility with some of us around the turn of the century, when it fatally misunderstood US politics and wrote columns addressing people like Karl Rove and asking them to follow their better nature. (Karl Rove does not have a better nature.)
    - moomin 4y ago
      Not helped by one of their senior editors taking a sabbatical to become a full time crank.
    - systemvoltage 4y ago
      I've been reading Economist since a teenager it is by far the best source of general global news in bite sized format. Excellent in every way from writing to admitting to mistakes. It is actually amazing that it is still relatively in the same shape despite of all the polarization in the world. HN has a strict bias for attacking Economist because they tend to take positions on things HN doesn't want to confront (anti-EU in this article). My honest view of this place. So you see attacking Economist rather than actually debating the talking points, quite a pattern.
    - jlmorton 4y ago
      Maybe, but then there was this [1]. [1] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2004/05/06/resign-rumsfeld https://www.economist.com/leaders/2004/05/06/resign-rumsfeld
MrPowers 4y ago
There is an excellent Real Life Lore video on "How Russia is Crippling Germany with Gas" that has quite a different take: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi74gPrn24Y&ab_channel=RealLifeLore https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi74gPrn24Y&ab_channel=RealL... Peter Zeihan also has quite a different perspective. > those in Europe’s biggest economy will be able to behave as if not much is going on It seems like the shut down of the Nord Stream will have a big impact on German manufacturing. I'm not sure how they'll be able to "behave as it not much is going on".
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
Even with the rest of the comments here, the single market has issues, especially in the energy sector. I live in slovenia, and with some minor modifications we have enough electricity for our country (two factories shift to half-production, and we're there). We also don't use a lot of russian gas, but mostly rely on hydro, some coal (we even have a coal mine) and nuclear... so, no problem for us, we're safe for the winter. But, we've joined a single market for electricity, and (to very very simplify it), all the power goes into a single "pool", and countries buy it "at an auction"). ... this means, that we will produce enough power for us, but that power will be on the market for foreign buyers, especially the ones who earn 2-3x as much as we do (monthly wages) and whose governments will add aditional taxpayer money to offset individuals prices... one of those countries is germany. So the result will be, that instead of keeping our own, and let 'the big ones play politics, they're the ones who started this whole mess', we'll be fucked with reductions in power too.
- wooque 4y ago
  You have to make some sacrifices for the family
SevenNation 4y ago
The article is really about something called the NGEU: > ... Thus, as the pandemic raged, a novel form of European solidarity was agreed in the form of a €750bn bail-out fund, Next Generation eu (ngeu). The money is a form of redistribution: it is borrowed by the eu, but will in effect be paid back by its richest members while being doled out to its poorest. This gave fiscal capacity for southern Europeans to stimulate their own economies in the recovery. I can't imagine something like this is on the table now. Germany's balance of trade, peaking at 2.5 trillion euro in 2015 is now almost zero. That's fine for a country that issues its own currency, but not one like Germany that doesn't. The days of German largesse are in the rear-view-mirror now. Europe will need to find a way to cope without its economic Willy Wonka. https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/balance-of-trade https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/balance-of-trade Also, the title in the article is: > A German aid package revives calls for solidarity with poorer EU countries which is not as sensational as the HN title.
- netsharc 4y ago
  I don't think it's the NGEU, that was for Covid, but recently Germany just said it will borrow 200 billion Euro to be distributed to German businesses as help, and the article is saying that's not very fair.
- gsatic 4y ago
  Not too different from what happens in China or India. The imbalances between the rich provinces and poor ones are much more than in the EU.
AnonCoward42 4y ago
> Because of healthy state finances, it can afford to borrow up to 5% of GDP to create a “protective shield” that will insulate Germans from the cost of higher energy. I find this kind of insulting to Germans actually, since the energy prices were already high to begin with in Germany and the personal wealth of the lower 90% is actually so low that it is not hard to imagine how quickly society can collapse after the government has set so much money on fire just because they can. The problem with this "protective shield" is not that the intent is unjustified, but it comes way too late and I don't think it is going to help for long. I am honestly not sure there is a solution at this point anymore. They print money to dampen the price hikes, therefore increasing prices/devalue currency, therefore they need to print money.
unity1001 4y ago
This just helps Germany to avoid the repercussions of their gas supply going away. After improverishing other European countries by pushing to them the IMF-style neoliberal loans after forcing them to bail out PRIVATE German banks in those countries back in 2008 and then blaming the people of those countres for 'being lazy', they will be scarcely motivated to help Germany that way. Especially considering how German industry's competitiveness hangs on other countries' industries being weaker, bringing the Euro down to keep German exports competitive. This is a chance for all the other European countries in recovering their industries back - German industry shutting down means that domestic and foreign markets that those industries were dominating will now be open to other European countries. Couple this with the Euro going down and making European products more competitive, you can understand that why other countries are not so enthusiastic in bailing out Germany.
Proven 4y ago

50 points by ivanvas 4y ago

enlyth 4y ago

https://archive.ph/7ORCZ https://archive.ph/7ORCZ

chrisseaton 4y ago

> The single market is looking wobbly Note that the Economist is British.

secondcoming 4y ago
And?
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  I wonder what motivation the British could have for saying that the EU's single market is looking wobbly?
  - secondcoming 4y ago
    The Economist isn't a mouthpiece for the UK government.
    - donedealomg 4y ago
      Or the majority of the voters
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - luckydata 4y ago
    I don't know about the economist but there's certain stipulations that went into the foundation of the single currency that favored Germany heavily, and Germany behaved the whole time like it didn't happen. Most of the european resentment comes from that fact. Most southern european countries were taken for a ride during those negotiations, and have paid (and continue to) a steep price. I was a strong believer in the common currency but after reading about it for a while I'm not convinced it was a good idea anymore - if you're anyone except Germany or France. Paul Krugman wrote at length about why that was a mistake, and he was 100% right about it.
    - manu_te 4y ago
      France hasn't really benefited much. Italy has been the talking point for a long time and rightly so for the amount of debt plus the chronic political instability, but France is very much on a similar decline path. Edit: cheap Russian gas + high productivity + political stability + undervalued currency (the Deutsche mark would have been way stronger than the euro) is what fueled German dominance in Europe. Italy/France/Spain/Greece/Portugal all struggled with varying degrees with low productivity, political instability (apart from France) and a currency that was too strong for their macro-economic fundamentals.
      - mytailorisrich 4y ago
        France has a talent for self-harm although they are not the only ones. Ultimately, Germany succeeded better because they acted better and more productively.
        tkk23 4y ago
        To spell it out: >President François Mitterrand argued for the single currency because he hoped to bolster French influence in an EU that would otherwise fall under the sway of a unified Germany https://www.economist.com/leaders/2012/11/17/the-time-bomb-at-the-heart-of-europe https://www.economist.com/leaders/2012/11/17/the-time-bomb-a...
    - chalst 4y ago
  - deadbeefpatty 4y ago
    This seems suspiciously close to an ad-hominem argument. The Economist is pro single market and advocated for remain (https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/02/27/the-brexit-delusion https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/02/27/the-brexit-del...)
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - YawningAngel 4y ago
    What motivation could we have? Most British people you talk to on the internet are distinctly unhappy about Brexit and, if anything, are motivated to talk up the single market
    - chrisseaton 4y ago
      > Most British people you talk to on the internet are distinctly unhappy about Brexit Most voted for it. If you're in a vacuum chamber that's your problem.
      - ggm 4y ago
        > Most voted for it. Of those who voted, a very small majority voted for it. By no means most British voters voted for it. A reprise of the vote now would not secure the same outcome.
      - YawningAngel 4y ago
        You'll be surprised to learn that the British people you talk to on the Internet are not sampled uniformly from the general population
      - andyjohnson0 4y ago
        ~37% of the electorate voted for it, six years ago. If you think it has become more popular in the intervening time then it may be that you're in the echo chamber.
  - netsharc 4y ago
    Believing different entities to be similar because they share one property in common is very convenient, but is very unintelligent...
HL33tibCe7 4y ago
But also note that the Economist is reliable factually, relatively unbiased, and is in general respected in the UK and further afield for both of those things. Its coverage of Brexit and EU matters more generally is usually balanced, and probably leans towards remain/EU if anything.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  > the Economist is reliable factually, relatively unbiased, and is in general respected in the UK and further afield ... coverage of Brexit and EU matters more generally is usually balanced, and probably leans towards remain/EU if anything Hmmm....

yrgulation 4y ago

“In case anyone felt their nose insufficiently rubbed in German success” All good things come to an end. Also it feels like if the weather will suck tomorrow it will be blamed on germany. Where are the other countries in all this? Taking a nap?

inglor_cz 4y ago
Germany was a huge winner from introduction of the Euro. Some other countries, especially the Latin bloc, cannot cope with the common currency. (Ironically, it was the German economists who used to be very skeptical against the common currency and were loud about it.) At the end of the day, the single market will only be popular if growth and prosperity are shared across the continent. If the economic periphery plagued by anemic growth and high debt burden expands, so will populist sentiments. And the economic periphery of the EU is already rather sizeable - even the former GDR could be counted in it, at least when looking at the structural unemployment and migration patterns of young qualified people. In the US, Trump won his mandate riding on a wave of such populist sentiments from the Rust Belt. In Europe, ethno-national differences run much deeper than interstate differences in America, so the end result may be a fatal split in the Union.
- mmarq 4y ago
  The Latin block (Southern Europe??) countries joined the euro to cut their interest rates, and that happened. The periphery is poor because it has been ruled by embarrassing governments for decades.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - harperlee 4y ago
    And in turn saw their industry unable to compete with the German one as deutsche marks stopped relatively appreciating with every german export. By the way they didn’t just join for that, so obviously saying “don’t complain! You got what you asked for” doesn’t really make sense as an argument.

durnygbur 4y ago

"capital has no nationality", then of course any capital excesses will trickle down just any time...

guerrilla 4y ago

> Imagine queuing up at a food bank only for a millionaire to rock up in a BMW and announce he is snapping up the entire supply of grub Except it's not a like foodbank; it's literally a market and this is the cost of markets and the reason many socialists oppose them.

systemvoltage 4y ago
> State-aid rules were suspended during covid-19, as national governments bailed out everything from airlines to pizzerias. This is anything but a free market, and the consequences thereof. Actually a very good analogy for NGEU program.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  As if industrial capitalists play fair. "Free markets" live in textbooks.
  - Proven 4y ago
    [dead]

zublet 4y ago

Another round of blaming Germany! I guess after the Nord Stream sabotage they need another issue. The whole of Europe took gas from Russia, but Nord Stream was the incarnation of evil. The press was full of Nord Stream articles and never mentioned the other pipelines. Poland took gas well into May 2022, and only stopped after Russia demanded payment in rubles. The Yamal pipeline is still standing. Europe still gets Russian gas via the Ukraine transit pipelines. So apparently the issue is that there must not be a direct connection between Germany and Russia, so the transit states have leverage. What does Poland do itself? It routes the new pipeline from Norway via Denmark and the sea, avoiding transit via Germany. Perhaps Germany should leave the EU like Britain if it is so horrible.

donedealomg 4y ago
14u2c 4y ago
> Poland took gas well into May 2022, and only stopped after Russia demanded payment in rubles. True, but Germany did the opposite and started buying the gas with rubles. It's no surprise that this caused some animosity.
- zapperdulchen 4y ago
  I think that's misinformation. Do you have a credible source for this? Here is mine: Gas only for rubles: is Germany also threatened with a delivery stop? [https://www-br-de.translate.goog/nachrichten/deutschland-welt/gas-nur-gegen-rubel-droht-auch-deutschland-ein-lieferstopp,T4DH71Y?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-br-de.translate.goog/nachrichten/deutschland-wel...]
midislack 4y ago
Just have the pipelines blown up. It's easy, everybody's doing it.

juusto 4y ago

If I had one euro for every time The Economist has said that the Euro/EU were wobbly/breaking/etc I could balance Liz Truss'es budget and have money left for some fish'n'chips.

systemvoltage 4y ago
This kind of ad-hominem happens on every Economist thread here. First order of business is to take a jab at the Economist. That just means factual things are being reported and people don't want to confront reality.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  The Economist lost a lot of credibility with some of us around the turn of the century, when it fatally misunderstood US politics and wrote columns addressing people like Karl Rove and asking them to follow their better nature. (Karl Rove does not have a better nature.)
  - moomin 4y ago
    Not helped by one of their senior editors taking a sabbatical to become a full time crank.
  - systemvoltage 4y ago
    I've been reading Economist since a teenager it is by far the best source of general global news in bite sized format. Excellent in every way from writing to admitting to mistakes. It is actually amazing that it is still relatively in the same shape despite of all the polarization in the world. HN has a strict bias for attacking Economist because they tend to take positions on things HN doesn't want to confront (anti-EU in this article). My honest view of this place. So you see attacking Economist rather than actually debating the talking points, quite a pattern.
  - jlmorton 4y ago
    Maybe, but then there was this [1]. [1] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2004/05/06/resign-rumsfeld https://www.economist.com/leaders/2004/05/06/resign-rumsfeld

MrPowers 4y ago

There is an excellent Real Life Lore video on "How Russia is Crippling Germany with Gas" that has quite a different take: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi74gPrn24Y&ab_channel=RealLifeLore https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi74gPrn24Y&ab_channel=RealL... Peter Zeihan also has quite a different perspective. > those in Europe’s biggest economy will be able to behave as if not much is going on It seems like the shut down of the Nord Stream will have a big impact on German manufacturing. I'm not sure how they'll be able to "behave as it not much is going on".

ajsnigrutin 4y ago

Even with the rest of the comments here, the single market has issues, especially in the energy sector. I live in slovenia, and with some minor modifications we have enough electricity for our country (two factories shift to half-production, and we're there). We also don't use a lot of russian gas, but mostly rely on hydro, some coal (we even have a coal mine) and nuclear... so, no problem for us, we're safe for the winter. But, we've joined a single market for electricity, and (to very very simplify it), all the power goes into a single "pool", and countries buy it "at an auction"). ... this means, that we will produce enough power for us, but that power will be on the market for foreign buyers, especially the ones who earn 2-3x as much as we do (monthly wages) and whose governments will add aditional taxpayer money to offset individuals prices... one of those countries is germany. So the result will be, that instead of keeping our own, and let 'the big ones play politics, they're the ones who started this whole mess', we'll be fucked with reductions in power too.

wooque 4y ago
You have to make some sacrifices for the family

SevenNation 4y ago

The article is really about something called the NGEU: > ... Thus, as the pandemic raged, a novel form of European solidarity was agreed in the form of a €750bn bail-out fund, Next Generation eu (ngeu). The money is a form of redistribution: it is borrowed by the eu, but will in effect be paid back by its richest members while being doled out to its poorest. This gave fiscal capacity for southern Europeans to stimulate their own economies in the recovery. I can't imagine something like this is on the table now. Germany's balance of trade, peaking at 2.5 trillion euro in 2015 is now almost zero. That's fine for a country that issues its own currency, but not one like Germany that doesn't. The days of German largesse are in the rear-view-mirror now. Europe will need to find a way to cope without its economic Willy Wonka. https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/balance-of-trade https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/balance-of-trade Also, the title in the article is: > A German aid package revives calls for solidarity with poorer EU countries which is not as sensational as the HN title.

netsharc 4y ago
I don't think it's the NGEU, that was for Covid, but recently Germany just said it will borrow 200 billion Euro to be distributed to German businesses as help, and the article is saying that's not very fair.
gsatic 4y ago
Not too different from what happens in China or India. The imbalances between the rich provinces and poor ones are much more than in the EU.

AnonCoward42 4y ago

> Because of healthy state finances, it can afford to borrow up to 5% of GDP to create a “protective shield” that will insulate Germans from the cost of higher energy. I find this kind of insulting to Germans actually, since the energy prices were already high to begin with in Germany and the personal wealth of the lower 90% is actually so low that it is not hard to imagine how quickly society can collapse after the government has set so much money on fire just because they can. The problem with this "protective shield" is not that the intent is unjustified, but it comes way too late and I don't think it is going to help for long. I am honestly not sure there is a solution at this point anymore. They print money to dampen the price hikes, therefore increasing prices/devalue currency, therefore they need to print money.

unity1001 4y ago

This just helps Germany to avoid the repercussions of their gas supply going away. After improverishing other European countries by pushing to them the IMF-style neoliberal loans after forcing them to bail out PRIVATE German banks in those countries back in 2008 and then blaming the people of those countres for 'being lazy', they will be scarcely motivated to help Germany that way. Especially considering how German industry's competitiveness hangs on other countries' industries being weaker, bringing the Euro down to keep German exports competitive. This is a chance for all the other European countries in recovering their industries back - German industry shutting down means that domestic and foreign markets that those industries were dominating will now be open to other European countries. Couple this with the Euro going down and making European products more competitive, you can understand that why other countries are not so enthusiastic in bailing out Germany.

Proven 4y ago