Is it termination time yet? For the booming German economy, I mean?
The Spiegel says: German manufacturing activity has hit a three-year low and export orders have also seen a big drop. This data suggests that the crisis is starting to hit the previously robust German economy.
Hasta la vista, baby? Maybe.
This time for real, though.
Berlin officials say the 20-year-old Dutchman who posed as a “forest boy” caused some $25,000 in unnecessary public expenditure during his nine-month hoax and are so pissed off about it that they are booting him out of the cushy public housing scam he had going.
“This was welfare fraud,” said one irrate municipal official. “Which is perfectly normal here, of course, but not when it’s such a big deal in the news like this. It makes us look like, I dunno, fools or something. So I’d say it’s time to hit the road, Ray. And never come back no more.”
The man arrived in Berlin in September, speaking English and claiming to be a 17-year-old teenager named Ray who had lived in forests with his father for five years, sleeping in caves or a tent, after his mother died in a car crash.
Flag waving still leaves a bad taste in many a German mouth, I guess. Especially if the flag in question is 220 square meters in size.
EM 2012 nor not, Berlin officials have refused to let a Turkish store owner mount a huge German flag above his storefront in Neukölln. Ordnung muß sein (order must prevail) again already. “It was not connected properly and covered up a few windows.”
Go Germany!
“Die Entscheidung lag im Ermessen der Beamten vor Ort.”
What a perfect title for a graphic novel about the Bundeswehr‘s mission in Afghanistan.
German illustrator Arne Jysch has completed his first graphic novel. Congratulations. I’m sure it’s fantasy comic material at it’s finest (in some scenes German soldiers are actually seen doing some fighting, for instance).
“The advantage of fiction is that you can combine real experiences that different people have had (in other armies?) and mix them all up,” he explains.
Jysch has never been to Afghanistan.
PS: I read recently that German soldiers in Afghanistan, being frustrated about having to be German soldiers in Afghanistan, have their own definition for ISAF: I saw Americans fighting.
Unable to compete in the global market without the subsidy drug, state-ordained “energy turnaround” or not, Germany’s solar energy industry is getting eaten alive by cheap Chinese imports as we speak, so-to-speak.
“Ah, screw it,” German industrialists elsewhere in the country say to that. “We’ll just keep making a killing producing what we’ve always produced best: War technology. Tanks, Saudi Arabia!”
“But it’s not like we don’t continue to support the Arab Spring or anything,” another tankful German industrialist added ruefully.
German paper says Saudis want 600-800 tanks.
That’s the thing about a crisis: There’s always a winner, too. Take the euro crises, for instance. And the demand for German bonds these days.
Demand for German bonds, seen as the safest haven in the euro zone, has pushed Berlin’s borrowing costs so low that some investors are effectively paying Germany for the privilege of lending it money.
Damn. This gives German bondage a whole new meaning.
Low interest rates on German bonds are translating into billions in savings. Now economists have calculated that the country should be able to balance its budget by next year — something that is likely to increase criticism of Germany’s crisis management.
…The perception that Germany is benefiting financially from the crisis while imposing strict austerity measures on countries in southern Europe is unlikely to win many friends for Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is already highly unpopular in countries such as Greece.
Well, there’s disillusion and there’s disillusion.
A new survey indicates that German disillusionment with the US president is “widespread.” Wow, like what a surprise or something. Even the Germans catch on eventually.
But wait, please look a little closer. The real news story has to do with the numbers behind this so-called disillusionment. “Disillusionment with Obama” over here means:
Nevertheless, they (the Germans) still have overwhelming confidence in Obama’s overall international leadership. In fact, at 87 percent, Germans are the most supportive in Europe… And nine out of 10 Germans want to see Obama re-elected.
Huh? OK. Unbelievable as usual. It never ceases to amaze me. In a nation so openly sensitive to the concept of Gleichschaltung (enforced political conformity, as in the Third Reich kind), how can you get more gleichgeschaltet than that?
In retrospect, hopes for an Obama presidency were unrealistically high, especially among Europeans.
Boy oh boy, German President Joachim Gauck is in hot water with the German Left now. Bless his heart.
During a visit to something called the Leadership Academy for the Bundeswehr in Hamburg, he had the gall to demand “more openness” when it comes to Bundeswehr operations abroad.
He then had the nerve to say that there are once again German fallen (as in the soldier kind) no longer amoung us “who are hard to handle for those living in our pleasure-addicted society.”
And then he even had the chutzpah to say that violence can be “necessary and sensible when used to prevent violence itself.”
Needless to say, German lefties of all 57 varieties are now having a collective cow and lecturing him and the rest of us (I mean you) about how irresponsible such utterances can and must be whenever they come out of a German mouth. The same old same old, in other words.
You just can’t say stuff like this in Germany. It’s verboten. It’s taboo. And this guy says it anyway. In case you haven’t noticed, this is a President I like.
Schäfer nannte Gaucks “Äußerungen, um Opfer zu rechtfertigen, völlig falsch und fatal.”
The ones that used to go to the euro zone, I mean. Wo sind sie geblieben?
German imports tumbled at their fastest rate in two years in April and exports fell, adding to evidence that Europe’s largest economy is beginning to feel the chill from the euro zone debt crisis.
Hey, I’m all for austerity, too, Germany. But when your European partners are too austere to buy your German products, what happens then?
That’s when Plan B kicks in (the German master plan is well thought out, you know, the diabolical #!?§#!s): Exports to non-EU markets are now on the rise.
“German companies feel that foreign demand isn’t as dynamic as it used to be as the global economy is entering a weaker phase. The weakness originates in the euro area, where the debt crisis can no longer be felt only through budget cuts and austerity but increasingly creates uncertainty about economic prospects, which is reflected in weaker investment.”
The Economist writes: If the euro collapses, then Germany will suffer hugely.
The downgrading of some of its banks this week was a portent of that. Moreover, the undoubted mistakes in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Italy, Spain and the other debtor countries have been compounded over the past three years by errors in Europe’s creditor countries. The overwhelming focus on austerity; the succession of half-baked rescue plans; the refusal to lay out a clear path for the fiscal and banking integration that is needed for the single currency to survive: these too are reasons why the euro is so close to catastrophe. And since Germany has largely determined this response, most of the blame belongs in Berlin.
Throughout this crisis, Mrs Merkel has refused to come up with a plan bold enough to stun the markets into submission, in the same way that America’s TARP programme did. In short, even if her strategy has paid some dividends, its cost has been ruinous and it has run its course.
