Revista de imprensa (13/11/2011)

• «(...) The trade and competitiveness imbalances were too severe – and too profitable for the Germans – to last. Yet every attempt to resolve a crisis that could push us into a second great depression is met by German prevarication. If Germany allowed the European Central Bank to print unlimited stocks of money, the ECB could shock and awe the bond markets into submission. Germany will not allow it because the national myth holds that the Weimar Republic's hyper-inflation of 1923 brought the Nazis to power. Printing money today would be to repeat the mistakes of Germany's tainted past once again. If they were truly interested in warnings from history, Germans would understand that the proximate cause of Hitler's victory – which was in 1933, not 1923 – was not inflation but the mass unemployment bought by Heinrich Brüning, "the hunger chancellor". He responded to the Great Crash of 1929 in much the same way that eurozone governments and the Cameron coalition have responded to the Great Crash of 2008 – by imposing an austerity that slashed salaries, cut services and left 30% of the workforce unemployed. Germany then resembled Greece, Spain and Italy now.
  
  
  
  Germany will not contemplate a dash for growth to boost demand in Europe, as a second best option. It will not allow fiscal transfers to the hardest-hit countries or a programme of debt forgiveness. It should start thinking about leaving the eurozone and allowing the rest of Europe to compete against it at a fair exchange rate. The German public never wanted the euro. It was always an affront to the best instincts of post-war Germany: a grand ideological design, that practical Germans had learnt the hard way to mistrust. But the official German ideology would denounce an attempt to leave as a return to the worst nationalist traditions of the past. (...)» (Nick Cohen)