Germany went from envy of the world to the worst-performing major developed economy. What happened?
Germany went from envy of the world to the worst-performing major developed economy. What happened?
Germany racked up one economic success after another for most of this century. But the loss of Russian natural gas due to the war in Ukraine has dealt a severe blow to its industry through higher energy costs.
For most of this century, Germany racked up one economic success after another, dominating global markets for high-end products like luxury cars and industrial machinery, selling so much to the rest of the world that half the economy ran on exports.
Jobs were plentiful, the government’s financial coffers grew as other European countries drowned in debt, and books were written about what other countries could learn from Germany.
No longer. Now, Germany is the world’s worst-performing major developed economy, with both the International Monetary Fund and European Union expecting it to shrink this year.
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What kind of propaganda non-sense article is that? I live in Germany. We're doing absolutely fine.
I’m fucking American and if you want the bottom spot you’ll have to fucking fight us for it!
Imagine believing for a second America is fighting for bottom ranks in wealth, even among the poor.
The imaginary world you people live in must be fantastic.
People in developed countries like US don't even understand what actual poverty is, give them some slack.
Tell that to all the homeless here. I'm sure theyd love to hear what "actual" poverty is like.
How about eating 4 slices of bread per day for months? Yeah, I have some "great" memories.
We must live in two different Germanies than. I travel a lot and other countries are moving forward a lot faster than we are. Thanks to the CDU we weren't doing much until recently. There are many topics that need attention, especially infrastructure, buerocracy, public health and retirement insurances, corruption aka "lobbyism", and the list goes on. That's all things you could fix one by one, but looking at how/what people vote, there won't be any progress in the next decade imho.
Funny how this comment can fit most of western Europe
It might be overstating some things, but I've heard quite a few hardware startups fail the past years due to parts shortage, rising parts costs, energy costs, etc.
On the large industry scale the machine is ticking away just fine, but I've experienced first hand how those factors have decimated any reserves small players have over the past few years. And large companies don't innovate nearly as much as small ones can - competitive advantages for the future are definitely lost here. While that may not be a problem today, that does mean Germany will be behind on innovation in 5 - 10 years.
And other countries didn't have parts shortage etc?
They did, but they didn't see as sharp of an energy price increase as far as I know. Our energy bill has increased so much that we had to not only deal with project (and thus payment) delays due to the shortages, but also with projects suddenly not bringing in money but costing us. This had a compounding effect on many small businesses.
You don't do business in Germany then because I've been hearing otherwise of late.
Like most other countries, we've had to deal with COVID, inflation+countermeasures and climate troubles. And as an export nation, we've likely even been hit relatively badly by such global issues.
So, of course, not everything is entirely rosy. And of course, you'll find people complaining.But this article makes it sound like we've entered a massive crisis. As if the Germany of today looks like a poor nation compared to the Germany five years ago. And that's just not the case. We're still filthy rich compared to most countries. Our current government is pushing the country forward again (after 16 years of stagnation before the pandemic). The fruition of these measures will obviously take some years to kick in, and we will now have to deal with climate change, whether we like it or not, but ultimately, it feels like our economy (+ the things that actually matter) are on an upward trend again.
Well it must be true because the author is an expert of the topic! That and Yeezys I guess (https://fortune.com/author/david-mchugh/)?