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.
“Germany is hugely successful and has been for years, but now it’s success is slightly shrinking.”
Now please blame socialism and I got that sweet capitalist circle jerk bingo
Blame the absolutely deranged state of German leadership that brought us such things as Ostpolitik, Nordstream 1 & 2, replacing nuclear power with brown coal power plants and green washing ‘natural gas’.
germany was and is one of the better working socialistic democracies. calm your prosecution fetish
I don’t feel persecuted, I just want to point out how stupid it is to portrait even the slightest economic hiccup as a major failure, especially after facing two crises in short succession (with the climate crisis not even counted).
In fact, what you pointed out is among the reasons for that: All things considered, Germany is doing pretty OK. And I think economic growth is a much easier to solve problem than becoming a more sustainable economy/society (i.e. having social stability, fixing the education system, becoming less polluting and more independent from the global superpowers).
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.
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.
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.
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/)?
In terms of energy, the major fuckup was making gas cheap and electricity expensive (with taxes and renewable subsidies paid by private consumers).
If gas is 6 cents per kWh and electricity 35, no wonder people were installing gas heaters instead of heat pumps. Gas now being 9 and electricity 40 doesn’t make it much better.
A heat pump would have to give you 4.4 kWh of heat for 1 kW of electricity to make financial sense even if it didn’t cost more (Wikipedia: “Test results of the best systems are around 4.5. When measuring installed units over a whole season and accounting for the energy needed to pump water through the piping systems, seasonal COP’s for heating are around 3.5 or less.”)
No more cheap russian gas and oil, internal combustion engine expertise and all the associated pieces and submarkets being phased out in favour of simpler electric cars…it’s going to be a few hard years until they find a new export industry to perfect. I’d expect hydrogen-based aviation or pharma, maybe even semiconductors, they’ll figure it out.
Well if Mercedes and BMW could stop making electric cars as ugly as humanly possible we would quickly see them take that market back. Lucid makes an INCREDIBLY gorgeous car and if I was in the market for an 80k plus dollar EV it would certainly be that over the ugly EQS sedan and the i7 EV with its buck teeth. The German automakers are stuck in a loop right now and I hope they’ll soon get out. As for Germany’s other economic sectors; much like the rest of the world everyone is still recovering from Covid economy shock. Especially when we went from producing nothing for 1-6 months, then slowly starting, then ramping up like crazy and now coming back down to reality. It’s going to be a rough couple years of Capitalism having to learn that businesses and economies staying flat isn’t a bad thing. No progress, but no loss either. Germany isn’t alone in this.
Ugly? Why do people fetishize their cars? I want it to work efficiently, be safe and cheap to maintain…if it looks like a gherkin, so be it 😄 The problem with German electric cars is not that, it’s that atm they can’t compete with China in price and they have no tech edge in supply chains anymore. Also, newer generations in Europe aren’t as obsessed with owning a car anymore (I think).
Why do we like eating nicely prepared food instead of a ground up paste? Its just nutrients, right?
Why do we wear nice clothes? Theyre just for enduring heat and cold, so black robes for everyone should do, right?
I don’t think people wanting a vehicle they might have to commute daily in looking aesthetically pleasing quite meets the mark of fetishising. You might be ok driving a cube 2.0 but the rest of the market may not be and considering electric is trying to break into the established market of ICE…. Though to the larger point, most places could solve the problem by fixing/modernising public transport but that may just be too radical apparently.
At this late stage of Neoliberal Capitalism, what’s deemed “economic success” is a measly 2% GDP “growth” and for Germany that can just be from exploiting its access to cheap hydrocarbons from Russia, something which is now pretty much over.
Meanwhile, like everybody else, Germany is suffering the cummulative effects of 4 decades of neoliberalism and its “oh so special” way of managing the Economy (unconditional saving of Financial giants that overextended themselves, like Deutsche Bank, maximizing rewards for asset ownership and pumping up asset bubbles all over the place and so on) not just directly but also indirectly because you’re seeing empoverishment on a per-capita level in the countries to which German companies exported.
I think (all of this is opinion) that the general late stage Neoliberal Capitalism malaise is affecting most western countries and then Germany, thanks to that extra push of loosing the golden goose of cheap hydrocarbons (which was so great for the likes of BASF) is just this little bit worst than most, and after a decade which normalized a few percent of GDP increment as “growth” it doesn’t take much of a “push” to have what is mathematically a large percentual difference in “growth” rates compared to the rest (i.e. when “growth” is 2%, loosing a mere 1% results in half the “growth”).
Last but not least, as we’re living in Peak Bullshit Times when it comes to Politically Important Financial Figures, all of this ends up reported with no sense of proportion so tiny changes in a aggregate figure (not even per-capita) that doesn’t even map to most people’s experience are portrayed as enormously important (notice how in the “good times” we were told 2% was the country “growing”, when that value is statistically within the margin of error of the very processes used to produce those figures).
Also, this neoliberal course fucked up education somewhat fierce. We simply can’t deliver the quality anymore as more and more experienced engineers (the main driving force behind those exports) are retiring. And don’t get me started on the terrible internet/cell infrastructure!
Don’t worry about BASF they’ve been preparing for the end of fossil fuels for decades and have a gazillion replacement recipes in place that they were already using depending on the oil price: If necessary they can produce all their precursors and therefore everything from e.g. starch, they’re also one of the primary investors in hydrogen infrastructure.
OTOH they’re nowhere close to being the poster-child of green chemicals, that honour goes to Werner & Mertz (and a couple of even smaller companies noone has ever heard of, e.g. folks working on lignin-based plastics).
And they didn’t use those recipes before, no doubt because the profit margins with those are lower.
It doesn’t take much of a loss in profitability for a company as large as BASF to pull down Germany’s GDP if only a little bit (and when the difference between GDP growth being reported as “strong” or “weak” is all of +/-1%, every little bit counts).
And then on top of that there’s other companies directly or indirectly dependent on cheap hydrocarbons, as well as the whole situation of the high dependency of German Households on gas for heating.
I for one think that over the long run getting rid of its hydrocarbon addiction will be good for Germany, but before the country gets there the cold-turkey period will naturally impact its GDP growth.
