Germany’s Obsession With Austerity Will Help It Spend Freely Now
After years of self-discipline, calls are growing for Germany to loosen the purse strings.
The dome of Germany’s Reichstag building.
Photographer: Fabian Sommer/picture alliance/Getty Images
Seemingly everything is going wrong in Germany all at once. The government collapsed, the economy is stagnating and the vaunted manufacturing industry will likely soon face the sting of Donald Trump’s trade tariffs.
But Germany has, as always, one very important thing going for it: The government’s fiscal accounts are rock solid, the product of decades of tough budget decisions, and this in turn has fueled chatter in political circles that the time has come to splurge a little. The government that emerges from the hastily-called elections in February should open the door, the thinking goes, to hundreds of billions of euros of bonds to finance a wave of new investment to overhaul the economy.