It’s kind of funny in a sad way that the stock markets of Spain have taken such joy in the crappy economic results coming from Germany.
Perhaps it was easy enough for Germany to prescribe austerity for other countries, but now that it is starting to see a major slowdown, Merkel’s enthusiasm for austerity perhaps might be weakened a little.
Of course, if you look at the example of Japan, it took them almost 20 years of crappy economic growth and half-assed attempts at money printing to get to where they are now, so expecting a quick turnaround on the part of Germany is very optimistic.
A couple weeks ago I talked to the CEO of a German logistics company, and he was telling me that they were battening down the hatches and many of companies were already putting their workers on government-paid “kurtzarbeit” leave.
It’s hard to be optimistic if the only hope for Europe is that things get so bad for Germany that Merkel finally comes to her senses. Most likely we still have many years at least of half-hearted growth boosting measures which just end up increasing everyone’s debt with no good results.
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