What will it take to make Berlin happy?
Nobody – but nobody – has done as well out of the euro as Germany. Whereas the vast majority of eurozone members experienced a revaluation upwards of the currency as a result of adopting the single currency, changing from the Mark to the Euro represented a steep devaluation of its trading currency for Germany. Below we see this graphically represented against the two big ezone basket cases, Italy and Greece:
Berlin was thus handed a free gift in terms of cheap exports….and boy did it take advantage. As a result of switching to the euro, it has almost entirely kept its share of world trade. But below we can see how everyone else (including its Finnish lapdog) did really rather badly out of it:
No other eurozone country, in fact, has made so much money out of joining the euro and then exporting to elsewhere outside the eurozone. So much so, in fact, that Germany is now the world’s biggest exporter by value….in effect – one might say – the world’s biggest multinational corporation.
It has raped ClubMed with a farcical austerity programme, broken endless codicils in the Lisbon Treaty, lied to the IMF, refused to compromise, ignored democratic votes….but still it quibbles while the euro burns.
It never paid my country, France, Russia or Greece a penny in reparations after the War. It got more Marshall Aid than anyone. It had its debts written off after 1952.
Today, it refuses to repay in kind.
So I repeat: it’s time we had an answer and a rationale to the obvious question, “What have you got to moan about?”
The Slog 