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The Financial Crisis comes to Germany

It appears that Germany is the place to watch now in regard to the ongoing financial crisis. There are many today who have been fooled by government lies and manipulated figures into thinking that we have bottomed out and things are now looking up. The disastrous financial reports by various corporations talk about how their huge losses are "less bad" than expected; and on that news, the stocks soar.

It gives us a whole new definition of Greenspan's "irrational exuberance."

It seems that Germany's latest report shows that its economy is collapsing faster than any other industrialized nation in history--even faster than America during the Great Depression.

"Last Friday the European Commission published what were arguably the most catastrophic economic statistics produced by any official institution in the capitalist world since 1945. These figures showed that Germany has suffered the steepest economic collapse ever recorded in a major industrialised country; and that several of the countries in Central Europe and on the periphery of the eurozone are now in a state of economic and financial meltdown comparable with Argentina, Indonesia and Russia in the 1990s or with Iceland last year."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/anatole_kaletsky/article6308164.ece

The author attributes this to the "perfect storm" consisting of:

1. Dependence upon exports in a time when no one is buying
2. Reckless lending to now-collapsing countries
3. The Euro itself. Eurozone governments borrowing in euros cannot simply print up more money to cover deficits, as they might do with their own national currencies.

When times are good, the nations that export the most are the ones who benefit the most. But in a credit crunch, demand dries up, and those same nations are the ones who suffer as a result. The problem thus shifts from one country to another by cause and effect, because of the globalization of the world economic system.

So just when people are told that "the worst is over" here in America, our "worst" is just now hitting Germany. And when they are hurt, they will return the favor in the next round. No, this is not over by any means. All that has been done so far is to transfer taxpayer money to the insurance companies who insured the bad mortgages--so that the banks don't lose money on their bad mortgages.

But people are still walking away from their mortgages. That has not stopped, and as long as it continues, the banker-controlled government will continue to use the taxpayers as their Sugar Daddy.

In 2007 the economy was supposed to turn around in 2008. In 2008 it was supposed to turn around in 2009. Now in 2009 they are talking about the economy turning around "by the end of 2010." Yeah, whatever. We need to understand Orwell's language of Newspeak so that we can translate it into English--and German.