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Comment by thriftwy | Hacker News Reader

Or maybe they would devalue their currencies and reindustrialize?

To reindustrialise, whatever it is supposed to mean for a country like Italy, has nothing to do with debasing a currency, unless the plan is to surreptitiously cut real salaries and hope nobody will ask for pay rises. They have been doing that in the UK since 2007, all they got is lower salaries.

Instead they got hush money to keep rotting away their industrial base and make sure that the best thing they have is German products consumers. I am forever angry at German "high politics", how did they think this is going to turn out? And they didn't even have the guts to say to their citizens "Hey you know all this EU-growth? It is because we suppress the periphery"

I hear this quite a lot. Italy received free money, but that was a secret plan of the Germans to take over the country, because they know that Italians are stupid and would destroy their industry and buy lots of Audis. But this eventually destroyed Italy and now nobody is buying Audis.

This implies that Italians are dumb and that Germans are still in the business of making evil plans that fail at the end, because good always triumphs.

"whatever it is supposed to mean for a country like Italy,"

Go look at the econ stats circa 2000 of Veneto, Lombardy and Piedmont and compare them to Germany's.

I mean that Italy, especially the north, has one of the strongest industrial sectors in the EU. It’s not a country that has to reindustrialise and even if it were, it would be doing it by debasing its currency.

Germany cuts wages in response to cuts in neighbouring countries. It must remain the export champion after all.

Germany doesn't cut salaries because it's not the Soviet Union where salaries are centrally planned nor a lady that can change prices turning a knob. Besides, salaries in Germany have been increasing every year in the past 20 years (bar 2020, for obvious reasons).

You can decrease real wages too. It is the same thing.

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