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Comment by npstr | Hacker News Reader

I'm from Germany, and im tired of the argument, the Germans should do something about their export.

Export exists, because someone outside of Germany thinks goods from Germany are better then goods from their country.

How to solve this problem? Go and produce better goods urself, instead of crying to Germany to make their goods worse.

The strong exports would be self regulating if Germany had its own currency the deutsche mark. If you have the Dmark and people like german cars, germans exports will rise and so will the currency deutsche mark. Like it is now, people like german cars, but germany has the euro so it can export good cars at an almost artificially by the euro cheap price.

Thus the south of Europe is trapped in the Euro as they do not increase productivity as much as the north and in some product cases does not make as good products as Germany.

The European politicians has pretended that all of europe are equal in productivity.

The german wants to sells cars in euroes, but you do not want to support the south permanently financially.

This is like going against the tide, its a matter of time before the Euro will fall.

I just hope Europe will unite in peace after that event.

The euro is crap and must be removed. I should have mentioned it to make my point clear. I don't even bother with thinking of a way to make German economics work while in the eurozone, simple because the financial nature of the eurozone is so bad thought out it must be removed, and then maybe we can start thinking about a better version of it.

It doesn't have to end like that. I'm pretty sure United States also have different levels of productivity between states and dollar works remarkably well for them.

USA have internal transmission mechanisms that even it out. It require a fiscal union or some other big common spending programs.

In the United States, our military spending and antipoverty aid mostly flows from high-productivity states to low productivity states, a de facto transfer payment between the rich regions and poor regions of America.

And even so, the politics of the poor regions have gotten so toxic that many of us in the rich regions wish we didn't have to carry them anyway.

The city of Detroit is a prime example of where it did not. They went bankrupt and had bailouts.

You raise a good point. I remember how this was discussed in the 90ies as a downside of the common currency, to be weighted against the benefit of simplified trade in a common market.

Worth noting that Sweden is in the EU but they maintain their own currency, so that is always a viable option for any country imo.

> Export exists, because someone outside of Germany thinks goods from Germany are better then goods from their country.

Exports exist because they are cheaper. And they are cheaper because local wages in Germany are depressed. And because local wages are depressed (e.g. they grow slower than GDP grows) we suddenly have a whole load of economic problems in Germany (I'm German, too, btw).

Have you ever asked yourself why both the public pensions and public health care suddenly could not be financed anymore? Because both are tied to real wages, e.g. health care is about 15.5% of your gross income. But if wages stop growing in line with GDP (and inflation), the absolute amount of euros available for health care and pensions shrinks. We have a whole boatload of problems in our domestic economy because of that focus on exports. So you and I are paying for Germanys exports with a bleak outlook into our own future. And thats what the criticism is all about: Most have no problems with German exports, they are criticizing the lack of imports that would offset the exports.

"Export exists, because someone outside of Germany thinks goods from Germany are better than goods from their country"

We wish economy was so simple.

Goods from Germany are better than goods from their country, and the price is good, and they can afford it.

How is that even possible? Where is all that money used to buy Germans goods coming from?

Loans from Germany (and others) that Greece may not pay back.

Absolutely. But, why to loan the money if they may not pay back? Maybe they shouldn't loan the money.

But, wait.. if they don't loan the money, who is going to buy their goods?

No one is saying to make German goods worse. This is completely missing the point.

The real problem is that the German export sector is benefiting enormously from having a currency that is tied to economies that have high levels of debt, creating huge problems in other Eurozone countries on the periphery (removing tools from policymakers like devaluation), making it more difficult to reduce unemployment and drag themselves out of recession.

Not everyone can be a big exporter like Germany by definition, some countries must be net importers.

That is not the argument people are stating.

First, the problem is how absurdly low the wages have fallen in Germany compared with the 'productivity' gains leading to highly profitable exports.

Second, a problem seams to be as well how Germany was actually ignoring the fact that it is a part of a larger interconnected economy.

Both problems are already discussed at quite global / high levels and are tackled by institutions more proficient with these issues than the "schwäbische-hausfrau" who tends to be quite proud of _efficiency_ and _austerity_ but at same time misses the larger picture of global economics.

I think, it's not a bad idea to let world recover after the financial crises in steps. Now with USA and Germany quite on the track the rest of Europe and the World can be guided out of the trenches... one after the other.

One problem is the communication ofc ;) How to make the "schwäbische-hausfrau" understand all of that plus the fact that 'economic-growth' or rather 'economic-development' (which i find to be the more fitting word) in the magnitudes we were used to in the last 30 years will not come back for a long time...

tldr: Germany is still super. But will need to share its wealth more evenly internally and externally to benefit even more ;)

(edit:typo)

Addendum: There is also export of unique goods, e.g. some countries have rare earths or some other unique ressource. Germany does not have any unique ressources, eversthing Germany does, anyone can go and do equally good/better himself.

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