Word: german
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Germany has learned a second lesson; big spending packages don't work if the economic policies underlying them are miscued. In hindsight, eastern Germany's economic wellbeing was sabotaged at the very beginning of the reunification process by the political decision to exchange its currency for West German marks at the rate of one-to-one. Haimann, of the Halle Chamber of Commerce, thinks that was a crucial error. The true value of the old East German mark was just one-fourth or one-fifth of the West German currency, so when it was swapped in 1990 at parity...
...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...
Once Bitten While Germany has learned the lessons of creative destruction the hard way, the government still believes it has a critical role to play in industry. Just this month, the fate of Opel, the German subsidiary of General Motors, has been at the top of the political agenda. Government ministers are refusing to loan the billions the carmaker says it needs to survive - and even imposing conditions on would-be buyers, which include Fiat. (See the 50 worst cars of all time...
...German skepticism about the utility of big government-spending programs endures, bolstering Merkel's determination to resist international pressure to take more decisive action to counter the economic crisis. Among those arguing forcefully against any new stimulus packages is the Taxpayers' Federation. Holznagel says that in the early 1990s his organization kept to itself doubts about the big spending on reunification - it was politically foolish to do otherwise. But now, he says, "the situation is completely different. The danger is always that money is spent neither appropriately nor efficiently...
That assessment may sound admirably prudent. But Germany is in bad shape. In Halle, they're feeling the pinch, again - even if the situation is (remarkably) not quite as bad as it is in west German regions such as the environs of Stuttgart, where almost half a million people have been put on short-term work since last October as auto and machinery factories have slowed production. The east has been somewhat protected because its firms don't export as much as their west German opposite numbers. An unmistakable streak of eastern stoicism helps, too. "I notice that when...