I was pretty amused by this piece at Ozy by Claire Jones and Valentina Romei. It seems that Germany’s export business is slowing down:
Alexander Hinterkopf, a maker of digital industrial printers, built his business through regular trips from the company’s German headquarters to big markets around the world. But in recent months his travels have been less fruitful.
“The environment can be summed up in one word — uncertainty,†says the Baden-Württemberg-based businessman. “Uncertainty is never a good thing in business, it means you always postpone decisions. Since the summer, I’ve been to China three times, and each time customers come up with another reason to postpone.â€
After a decade of boom, a darkening political climate is beginning to cloud the international economic outlook. The global economy is forecast to grow less than 3 percent for the first time since 2009 in 2019, according to Consensus Economics, which polls economists worldwide. Germany, the world’s fourth-largest economy, with an export machine of 1.6 trillion euros a year, is among those most exposed.
First off Germany’s imports from China are growing faster than its exports to China. That’s not hard to understand. China doesn’t need Germany any more to build its factories for them which is what a lot of Chinese-German trade has been. The Chinese can build their own factories now. And the Chinese authorities manage their trade so as not to import too much. Welcome to the club, Germany.
But it’s not just China that poses a problem for Germany’s export-driven prosperity. Fellow EU members are tapped out, largely due to German policies. They can’t borrow any more to import more from Germany.
When you take a “beggar thy neighborh” approach to trade and your neighbors become beggars, doesn’t that mean that your plan is working?
