This past Tuesday, in Stuttgart, Germany, before a conference of the Lutheran World Federation, Germany’s finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble made a disturbing statement when he urged western nations to “deliberately put the brakes on economic growth and enjoy what they have.” He said that Germany also should “campaign for a limitation on economic growth in western nations.”
This is at a time when most of the western nations; the United States and Canada, as well as most of the nations of Europe, are in the deepest recession since the great depression and all, except Germany, are experiencing negative economic growth. They all have massive trade deficits with the other countries in the world, including foremost, China, Japan and Germany itself, all of which have massive trade surpluses with the rest of the world. In the case of China, almost all of the goods being exported from China are products made by other country’s companies, including large percentages of Japanese and German products. Japanese and German companies, wherever they are located, including in China, are by far the two largest exporting nations in the world in terms of their national company products. China may have just passed Germany as the largest trading nation in the world; however, a large number of the products that China is exporting to the rest of the world are German company products.
The German finance minister is making this statement at a time when the other nations of Europe, as well as the United States, have been pressing Germany for years, as well as Japan, to stop treating the rest of the world solely as an export market for their national companies’ products, and start importing more goods from the United States, the nations of Europe, and elsewhere, which both countries have refused to do. While the rest of Europe flails in a deepening recession with high levels of debt, incurred partly by massive trade deficits with Germany that have persisted since the end of World War Two, and increased social costs due to the job loss that Germany’s trade and capital practices have entailed in violation of GATT and WTO trade agreements, Germany has consistently refused to import more goods from other countries.
Economists have said that Germany’s trade practices have been a primary cause of the European economic crisis. French economist Guillaume Duval, has stated that “Germany’s obsession with maintaining a positive balance of trade makes it a predatory nation.”
Germany, along with Japan, have had their feet firmly planted on the brakes of their own economies. They have focused all of their capital, energy and effort on exporting their national company products to other countries, in order to challenge and harm other countries’ competing industries.
As well, is the question of what right the German government has to tell any other nation what it should do about it’s economy. It’s particularly disturbing right at the present time, given that all of the western nations, except Germany, are in terrible recessions, which infers that Schaeuble wants the nations of the west to remain in a state of recession, and negative growth, something that certainly is not beneficial to these nations. The recession that the U.S. and other western nations find themselves in, is massively destructive not only to these countries, but the world economy, since these nations have historically been the largest markets for the world’s goods, including the primary markets for Germany’s goods.
Disturbingly as well, Germany, as well as Japan, are using their increased economic might, and the economic problems of other nations, to increase their political power and control and lessen the political power and control of nations that are in economic difficulty vis a vis Germany and Japan.
Both Germany and Japan have been exerting an ever greater hemispheric economic domination; Germany in Europe, and Japan in Asia. They have also been increasing economic control over the rest of the world, having attained monopoly control over a large number of industries worldwide. They are the largest foreign investors in the world as nations.
Just this past Wednesday, Germany, as well as France, which has a foreign relations pact with Germany, said that they wanted to suspend the voting rights of EU member states which run up excessive deficits and impose financial sanctions on them. This is occurring as the EU as a body, has been used to assume ever greater political and economic power and control from the nations that belong to the European Union.
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