GER politics thread
 

We have one for the US, we have one for the UK - but none for Germany, the only remaining most important player in the EU after Brexit?

I get it started here, and we start with this article on the current voters' mood in Germany and the chances of the two candidates for the German general elections in six months.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...302-druck.html

P.S. Too bad that German media in past years have dramatically reduced their translation services and international (=English) media representation. Input from non-German media and international sources is thus welcomed.

Schulz? Does the Luftwaffe have enough private charter flights for him? :haha:

I really can't see him with his EP record being any more popular than Tante Merkel, but at the moment I think a bag of concrete is probably more popular.
Still, either are better than Meuthen, Petry or Bachmann.
Whoever gets it though has their work cut out though, no mistake.

Latest polls two days ago or so gave Schulz a 13 or 15 point lead over Merkel... Currently. And I think the absolute majority.

Its like it was in the US: Germans are called to choose between pest and cholera.

LOL, isn't that the usual choice in many an election these days.

I wouldn't bet against Merkel, she is a survivor.

The question I pose is.....are the right in the likes of Germany, France, Holland etc. yet strong enough to build a majority or have the ability to find sufficient coalition partners to gain power?

At the present time I think not but there is growing support for such factions.

Le Pen in France may have a realistic chance to become first already this coming election. Whether that automatically results in the FN forming a government coalition under its lead, is something else. But with so many people being fed up by the state of things in the West in general, anything is possible now.

Germany finds it hard to adapt to the apparently coming age of tax wars. But with its strong export focus it is depending on an international system that both Trump and May openly threaten to destroy.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...a-1134668.html

I often said that I consider a country whose economy is too dependent on exports and thus factors outside its influential reach, is not really strong in economics, but weak, because it is highly dependent and vulnerable. As every martial arts athlete knows: solid stand and flexible, dynamic body tension is everything. The German stand is anything but that strong as it seems.

My money is on Merkel.

I don't even want to think about a victory of Schulz and a SPD, Green, Left coalition.:Kaleun_Sick:

The only thing I know when it comes to Germany is that both Denmark and Sweden is very dependent on how well it goes economically in Germany

Markus

It will take France to withdraw from the EU to cause massive damage but only the withdraw of Germany would bring it crashing down. And I just don't see ether country withdrawing any time soon.

Her star is descending, and she knows it, you can see and hear it in her. She has no chance to get elected due to conviction, not after the mass migration problems she channele dinto Europe and into Germany. If she wins (and I am anythig but sure on that), she only wins because people vote for her to prevent Schulz, like many voted for Trump just to prevent Clinton. Merkel has no opinion or conviction majority in Germany anymore, these times are over.

Does Germany have the funds and will to make up for the shortfall in income to the EU post Brexit?

All EU countries are very dependent on how well it goes in Germany. ;) Take away Britain, France, Italy, and the EU could still hobble on, somehow. Take out Germany from the EU equation, and the EU collapses within shortest imaginable time. Its not just the funding of the EU and about money, its also about the network of trading contacts, the traffic of goods, the longer, interlinked prouction lines that thanks to globalization make everybody more dependant and vulnerabel than before.

Lucky will be him who can afford to stay with himself and is autark. Germany is not. And this is what they call economic strength! :har: The revenge will find my country, its just a question of time. He who climbed higher than all others, will fall deeper than all others.

Funds are relative, since money is created at will by alchemists these days, value-securities are not needed anymore nor expected. The will? They maintain an intimidating front to Britain to penalise it and to scare away others wanting to do like Britain. But for Germany, the fall-away of Britain means the loss of the closest - before France! - ally in finacial discipline inside the eU, this is what makes the Brexit such a big headache for Germany, also that in the EU it is our most important trading partner. All others remaining, are against Germany, all want to spend more, more debts, more inflating and devaluing of money, more financing of rotting states by the ECB. and so forth. Italy wants it. Spain. France. Greece. Italy is stumbling. France is even bigger a thread to fall. Ticks sucking blood.

Its all a terrible mess, and it becomes messier every month and with every conference held by the ECB. Those TARGET2-saldi will one day fall down on Germany like a burning sky.

Its a long-known social-psychological dilemma, they have written books about it: when somebody has invested much into the wrong ways, he tends to stick even more to these wrong ways the deeper he manouvers himself into them - due to his fear that if he now gives up, all the earlier "investments" will be lost. By this "logic", he accepts to move from bad to worse and from big danger to guaranteed self destruction.

Let there be the German elections, and no matter who won them by then, after that the next government will be much more lenient again to allow Greece another escape, and more spending, and more debts, and more braking of legal obligations, treaties and laws. In the end, Germans, like everybody lse, prefer a horror without end to an end with horror.

By the end of tis century, we will see a very small elite in Europe ruling Europe in a very autocratic, if not openly tyrannic manner, with most of the material wealth focussed in even fewer hands than already now. On the way there we will go through various levels of intense violence and anarchy and and civil-war like rioting. When the new imerial order emerges, most people will even welcome it, just to feel at least physically safe again. But I forsee it will be life in poverty and misery and dictatorship. The writings aleady are ion the wall, but only few dare to open their eyes and read and take them as what they are. Because these writings on the wall as well predict a massive loss of all what has been invested in the past. And people just cannot imagin that this could happen. When bad luck or tragedy strikes people, usually the first question always is "Why me?"

Well - why not you? Even more since everybody is so eager to let it come this far?

So, Germany will carry on. It will pay for others with what today humorously and grotesquely gets called "money", and it is willing to do so. We will continue to do so until it really is too late and all is lost. Becasue as long as it is not to late and not all is lost, it still is not too late and not all is yet lost. Thats the simple logic behind it.

Bigger thread to the social peace over here is inflation killing private savings. Still, people are peaceful since most are not realyl understanding the danger and beleive the mainstream brainwash, and give their poltical loyalties more according to family habit than raisnable thnking, not to mention: insight into the real matter. This state cannot last forever.

Inflation increases just the QUANTITY of money, while deflation increases the QUALITY of money. That is somethign that even most politicians and bankers do not seem to understand. The needed cures all get prevented. The needed corrections are verboten. Social concerns lead the way into mass ruin. How social is that...?

@ Skybird

But we do not have any inflation. Or we do have now, around 1 percent or 1.7, but only recently, not in the last decade.
Interest is so low, the banks almost pay you for lending mony from them. Paying back our house, currently 3 percent interest and the rest is real acquittance. We are not rich but we never had it better financially. Some refugees nearby, two have been working in our compoany for practice, one of them wants to become an electrician, the other will probaboy be going back and organise help for Sudan from here.

And it is of cause all so messy and bad here in Germany, nothing to eat and the people suffer from all those terrorist attacks.
Not me though, but i am apparently living somewhere else.

You really believe that superficial simplicty called "official inflation" statistics, eh? ;) Please tell me you don't.

You increase the ammount of money in circulation day in day out, and you have no inflation. Sure. With every credit taken by somebody, banks created new "money" from nothing. But that is no inflation. Sure. The ECB accepting even the most toxic of waste papers as securities, giving out new money for them in return. But no inflation. Sure.

What you have, is clever abuse of statistics and suggestive catch phrases to hide the inflation. What you have, is delay of insolvency.

Its been lioke this excessively since the past coupld of years. But in principle it has been like this since decades. The D-Mark had lost over 80% of its buying power when it was replaced by the Euro - so much for "stable currency". The Dollar today has I think less than 2% of the buying power it had at the end of the civil war. But it is called a solid currency.

Stop believe the textbook propaganda. I instead recommend to you Roland Baader: the books Geldsozialismus, Kreide für den Wolf, Die betrogene Generation, or Christoph Braunschweig: Wohlfahrtsstaat - Leb Wohl!, Die demokratische Krankheit; or Weik & Friedrich: Der größte Raubzug der Geschichte, or Detlef Schlichter: Das Ende des Scheins, and of course anything by Alfred Hayek or Ludwig von Mises.

Its nice you pay little interest rates. But if you think the money in general has more value because of that and that there is no damage down to the whole system, then you just do not look far enough. Look beyond your garden's close horizon. BTW, as long as a single rate sitll is left, it is not your house, but the bank's house. You signed that at the vey beginning of it all. ;)

Artifically talked down interest rates so that people can buy houses who actually could not afford it - wasn't that at the beginning of the mortgage crisis in the US 15 years ago? If money would be so valuable as you say that there is no inflation - how comes that the stiockmarket is overheated (or do you believe the real economy has grown in real absolute worth by several factors within the past 15 years...? )

You could as well say there is no manipulation of the gold price. If the gold price would not be manipulated and would be allowed to move freely, it would be somehwhere between 2500 and 4000 by now, I estimate. If not even higher. Beeing seen as the clasiscal alarmometer, politics, governments and central banks cannot afford to let the gold price freely express the devaluation of paper money, it would bring the globe to a total and complete collapse immediately. The illusion must be supported. No. Matter. What.

QE - Quantitative Easing - is nothing else but artificially boosted inflation.

“Die Politik kann die ökonomischen Gesetze nicht außer Kraft setzen, aber sie kann so tun, als ob sie dazu in der Lage wäre. Leider dauert es eine ganze Weile, bis diese Täuschung ihre jeweils desaströsen Wirkungen voll entfaltet und damit offensichtlich wird. Bis dahin ist dann eine neue Generation an Wählern herangewachsen, der man den Bären vom Primat der Politik erneut aufbinden kann.” - Roland Baader.

Corrected that for you.

In German, and thus mainly for Catfish, but also for anyone who can understand written German:

Link - "Inflation - The papery suicide"

What to learn from this? When within one or two generations only, things and stuff start to cost 30, 40, 50, 60 times (not percent, but factors!) as much than before, then you have inflation, and there is no use in trying to talk of "stable currencies".

And here is the translation I was looking for, for a quote by Mises:

"There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved."

And more - sorry, cannot find it in English:

"Diese erste Phase des inflationären Prozesses kann viele Jahre andauern. In dieser Zeit haben sich die Preise vieler Güter und Dienstleistungen noch nicht den veränderten Geldverhältnissen angepasst. Einige Menschen im Land haben immer noch nicht erkannt, dass sich hier eine Preisrevolution vollzieht, die letztendlich zu einem deutlichen Ansteigen aller Preise führen wird, obgleich die unterschiedlichen Waren und Dienstleistungen nicht im gleichen Ausmaß steigen werden. Diese Menschen sind nun immer noch im Glauben, die Preise würden eines Tages auch wieder sinken. Im Warten auf diesen Tag schränken Sie ihr Kaufverhalten ein, wodurch ihre Geldbestände gleichzeitig anwachsen. Solange die öffentliche Meinung noch von solchen Vorstellungen geprägt ist, ist es noch nicht zu spät für die Regierung. Noch kann sie ihre inflationäre Politik aufgeben.

Doch dann wachen die Massen schließlich auf. Plötzlich wird ihnen klar, dass bewusst und vorsätzlich Inflationspolitik betrieben wird und dass sie kein Ende finden wird. Es kommt zum Zusammenbruch. Die Zeit der Katastrophenhausse ist gekommen. Jetzt ist jeder darauf bedacht, sein Geld schleunigst gegen "reale“ Güter einzutauschen, ganz gleich, ob er diese braucht oder nicht und ganz gleich, wie viel Geld er für sie bezahlen muss. Innerhalb sehr kurzer Zeit, innerhalb weniger Wochen oder gar Tage, werden die Dinge, die zuvor als Geld genutzt wurden, nicht mehr als Tauschmittel eingesetzt. Sie werden zu Altpapier, gegen das keiner mehr etwas eintauschen möchte."

This is not any difficult to understand at all. Its basic, profound, and simple.