Word: germanics
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...chief executive of Trumpf, a German family-owned machine-tool firm. It has enjoyed a surge in worldwide orders over the past three years, with sales jumping 35% since 2004. Demand from the U.S., the firm's second-largest market after Germany, has accounted for a significant part of this growth. But even though the pace of American orders is now slowing, Trumpf's sales elsewhere-from Saudi Arabia to Singapore, and especially back home in Germany-continue to rack up double-digit growth rates. "We can feel the U.S. slowdown, but it's not unsettling. There's no crash...
...doing better than just fine," says Jim O'Neill, London-based head of global economic research for Goldman Sachs. Even if the U.S. economy remains soft for much of the year, O'Neill adds, "we're pretty confident that the rest of the world will withstand it." At the German Engineering Federation in Frankfurt, chief economist Ralph Wiechers concurs. "It used to be that the U.S. economy supported the world economy," he says. "Now it's the other way around...
...worldwide. The key bone of contention is the extent of the suffering. Those who dispute the decoupling theory point to the seemingly insatiable appetite of American consumers for imported goods, which has been a critical driver of the world's economic expansion. There are still relatively few signs that German, Japanese or Chinese consumers are ready to step up to replace them. For example, while China's imports are way up, those gains are due less to a free-spending middle class than to increasing demand for raw materials and components to feed the country's manufacturing sector, which turns...
...moment, these risks seem manageable. Central banks, especially in Europe, have been raising rates to head off inflation. And there are several initiatives underway between Europe and the U.S. that aim to counteract protectionist pressures at home and abroad. German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Washington this month to push a plan that would harmonize investment and trade rules across the Atlantic. And the European Union and the U.S. recently got back together in a new and perhaps final attempt to salvage the World Trade Organization's Doha Round of negotiations. "We are in the endgame," says Peter Mandelson...
...billion trade surplus in the first 11 months of last year, the largest since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The good news is that buoyant exports have boosted business confidence in Europe's biggest economy and led to an unexpectedly strong increase in domestic demand. German companies appear to be hiring again: in December, the number of jobless fell by 100,000, the best monthly improvement in years, although the overall unemployment number remains a very high 9.6% of the workforce...