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I find this whole issue difficult in a number of dimensions:

1) The high moral tone attributed to Germany's export-led, trade surplus prosperity.
It seems in every reality-based economics framework to require some others to import and have a trade deficit - so it's not clear to me that there's an easy way to allocate moral superiority. As for budget borrowing - it's not so long since Germany bent the rules on the GSP...

2) I can understand ordinary Germans feeling hard done by - wage stagnation and even decreases have been their lot for a while... but at the same time it seems that corporate profits have not been so stagnant... so I wonder about the "competitiveness" tales being told. Bait and switch by the German plutocracy?

by Metatone (metatone [a|t] gmail (dot) com) on Tue Apr 13th, 2010 at 09:17:35 AM EST

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