After WWII. the USA and other non-European states also helped Central Europe redevelop through programs, such as the Marshall Plan. There was no hyperfocus on austerity in Germany after WWII. The focus was on building a new society.
Where is German focus on building a new and better Europe--and world--today?
The rest of the world and most of Europe find that Germany is focused on its short-term future--i.e. as European Economic Juggernaut already--at risk to great but long-term European and Social projects.
Wolff summarized the project Cyprus as follows: "Cyprus is a small country. Its economy is based on three things: tourism--it's a very pleasant place for northern Europeans to go; shipping, as befits an island; but above all, what is euphemistically called "finance." In the go-go years of the 1990s and early in this century, what the banks in Cyprus did is offer themselves around the world as a wonderful place to come and make a deposit. "We will convert whatever currency you have into euros," which is a very good currency to have. "We will pay you an unusually high interest rate. We will ask no questions." This is often called "good banking." So they got a lot of deposits. To give you an idea, depending on the estimates you believe, the total deposits in the banks of Cyprus were five to eight times larger than the total GDP, the total output per year, of that economy, which is an absurd situation.And those banks in Cyprus took all those deposits, and then they did what banks are supposed to do: find prudent, safe, non-risky investments. And like all big banks in the last 20 years, they failed. They found bad investments. They didn't do it prudently. They misassessed the risk. And then the banks fell apart. Since that's an outsized part of the Cyprus economy, the whole Cyprus economy, already impacted by this crisis with less tourism and less shipping, now saw its banks defunct--bankrupt, basically--and appealed to Europe to bail them out, which is the standard procedure now in Europe as these economies have such trouble."
Germany needs to reflect on the basic issue here: What is Europe (including Germany) going to do to protect all European peoples from bad banks and anti-democratic developments, like financial fascism?
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KEVIN STODA-has been blessed to have either traveled in or worked in nearly 100 countries on five continents over the past two and a half decades.--He sees himself as a peace educator and have been-- a promoter of good economic and social development--making-him an enemy of my homelands humongous DEFENSE SPENDING and its focus on using weapons to try and solve global (more...)
