The funny thing is, I do have the suspicion that it is sort of cyclical (in the grand scheme), that economies, like people have times of low energy and confidence, but these tend to turn around if the fundamentals are strong.

In particular, it is now 16 years since the reunification of Germany, it should be (by my guess) 20 years (that's how long a lot of these things seem to take) before Germany reaches the prosperity it would have been in without unification and thus, likely it should be coming out of the doldrums now, or sometime soon.

The sadness of course is that people have tried to ascribe significance to these cycles as criticisms of ways of running economies, without taking the context into account.

(This all runs off my contention that Germany is a core economy in Europe, it has to be going good for the EU figures as a whole to be good.)

Now whether the EU can easily weather the bumps that a declining dollar appears to presage is something I'm less sure about. In fundamental terms it clearly can, but we live in a world floating on liquidity and "investment confidence" which is perhaps much more globalised in nature these days.