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Comment by hogFeast

Do you know about the behaviour of German savers? It is fundamentally different to America, the UK, most other countries in Europe. The only similar nation anywhere is Japan...and even then, still significant differences.

The ECB is making a huge push, without any kind of democratic consent, towards a finance-based, American/UK-style financial system. This won't work because German savers have virtually no experience of such a system.

All that will happen is: banks go bust (more bust, most German banks are insolvent), and savers lose all their money. Either they hold their money in banks or they take it out and lose it all doing stuff they know nothing about (if we don't have an immediate recession, you will see French investment banks swarm Germany...French bankers have some kind of innate ability to produce bullshit derivatives aimed at savers with a conservative bank-led culture of saving).

It is kind of insane that we have got to the point where policymakers actively ignore markets. All that matters are the textbooks. But this doesn't work. You can't just transplant economic policies from another context and expect them to work the same.

That said, it will be nice to see Germany return to the early 2000s. Objectively, Germany has one of the most vulnerable and poorly functioning economies in the G10. Combine this with utterly insufferable, self-important policymakers and you have quite a nice example of natural justice.

parent hogFeast 7 years ago

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