Word: germanism
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...Frank Lloyd Wright. Its three adjacent bays of glass wall at the end of each floor bear trace elements of the tripartite "Chicago window" that was one of the city's early contributions to skyscraper style. And the whole place speaks the language of Mies van der Rohe, the German Modernist who fled to Chicago in the 1930s and filled the city with his resolute exercises in glass and steel...
...Dagmar Szabados has seen such spending before - she knows what it's 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...
...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 up rustbelt cities like Detroit or Harbin - would be advised to take some east German lessons. (See pictures of Detroit's decline...
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...