Word: berliner
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...like to be on the receiving end of a gigantic fiscal infusion. Szabados, a chemist by training, is the mayor of Halle, a mid-sized town in the middle of what used to be the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the formerly communist eastern part of Germany. Since the Berlin Wall fell, the old GDR has been showered with money. Overall, some $2 trillion has been pumped in - the equivalent of about 4% of Germany's economic output every year...
...that other exporting powerhouse, Japan. The government of Chancellor Angela Merkel is pumping $108 billion into the economy, but after an intense debate it has resisted international pressure to do more, saying it wanted to evaluate existing plans before adding new ones. But it isn't just officials in Berlin who might spend time in Halle seeing what an injection of money can and can't do to a local economy. Governments from the U.S. to China - anyone who believes that opening the fiscal spigot can stave off disaster, and especially those who think that public spending can polish...
...third lesson, and perhaps the most pertinent, is that spending so much money in such a short time is bound to be wasteful. "Every village wanted to have the same dog kennel," jokes Klaus F. Zimmermann, president of the Berlin-based German Institute for Economic Research (known by its German acronym, DIW). East Germany today has a number of promising industries and state-of-the-art roads and railways, but it also has superfluous airports, oversized water-treatment plants and a collection of heavily subsidized industrial white elephants, all built at the taxpayers' expense. "Floodlit sheep meadows," grumbles Reiner Holznagel...
...pictures of Berlin...
...number of lines in the book about how God needs man to sin so he can punish him. That's an interesting concept, could you speak a little bit about that? I had just done this hideous radio interview in Berlin for German public radio. At one point, I meant to say "Sieht so aus als haettest du all dein Deutsch vergessen," which means "I guess I've forgotten so much German." Only I misconjugated the verb vergessen to vergast, and when I came out of the interview, the publicist was a furious with me. Vergast is the past tense...