Retail sales in November also dropped 1.3 percent. More importantly ..."as shown by estimates of the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), the 2007 nominal retail turnover in Germany is expected to be between 0.7% and 1.0% smaller than in 2006."
Also industrial production fell 0.9 percent in November from October, the Economy Ministry in Berlin said today. Equally importantly construction output was down 1.6 percent from October.
Entering Reform Fatigue?
One of the thing which strikes me about all those false hopes for a sustained recovery that people are forever being offered in Germany and Japan is the corrosive effect that this can have on the psychology of all the ordinary people who are on the receiving end.
What Claus and I have been noticing is just how hard it is for people to take seriously the idea that there may be a long term underlying problem in these countries associated with years of very low fertility and population ageing. In both countries now, after years of hard and difficult reforms - what the Economist calls "cultural changes" - people may be less ready to receive yet another dose, and will quite possibly be willing to try different ideas and other formulas. Some indication of this is to be seen in the recent defaut of the LDP in the Japanese Upper House elections and the early departure of Abe.
So enter another argument. Consumption is weak because wages and salaries are too low. Companies in Germany and Japan have lots of profits,while what they don't have are wages, and hence internal consumption. To some extent, of course, this is the case. The question is why.If wages are trending downward in Italy, Japan and Germany as aggregate population age rises there may be some productivity and human capital related explanation for this, as I explain in my recent extensive study on the German labour market.
So it may be that - as the Financial Times reports this morning - we see some serious attempt in the short term to raise wages.
"German government and union officials gather on Thursday in the baroque town of Potsdam outside Berlin to start wage negotiations for the country's 1.3m civil servants, kicking off what the head of the country's largest trade union predicted would be a year of "mega-wage deals". After years of wage stagnation in Europe's biggest economy, calls for substantial pay increases are growing louder – and prompting warnings from economists about the potential impact on jobs and inflation."
Such an attempt to increase the wages share in German National Income in not supported by productivity and value chain shifts will, unfortunately, do more harm than good by slowing down the pace of job creation, and pushing up inflation in the short term. Since this will be unsustainable, as the economy slows the danger can then very rapidly shift from inflation to deflation. There are now no easy "instant coffee" policy solutions available to the underlying problem in Germany. The first step in begining to make the best of a bad job would be to recognise that what is happening actually is happening. Reading the majority of commentators at this point I fear we are still a long way from that recognition, so it seems things will continue to get worse before there is any chance of them getting better. I emphasise, the most important step towards begining to do what can be done now in Germany passes through a general recognition of the problem being faced. Without this there is little hope of real progress.
Conclusion, Have We Been Here Before?
To close, just a couple more graphs. We can see from the most recent export y-o-y chart that export growth is now slowing significantly, and that we are now entering the downward phase of the whole cycle. We have, of course, been here before, after the collapse of the internet boom.
It may be worth reminding ourselves at this point what ectually happened last time round, ie the last time the acceleration in the Y-o-Y growth rates in German exports effectively stalled. That was back in early 2000, as we can see from the chart below. And what happened at that next? Well the fed was easing as the US entered recession, and the euro was to some extent rising, both of which put a strong break on German exports. And after export growth collapsed, German GDP growth wasn't far behind. So it isn't the rise in the currency alone that matters, you have to think about the whole environment which produces it. Why your currency is rising, while someone else's is falling. And of course, in German export terms, after the rise comes the fall. This is the cost of not being able to depend on your own internal demand, you have to depend on someone else's demand.
Secondly, we should also think about what happens to employment creation and unemployment as GDP growth stalls. The chart below offers a comparison of movements in the two main unemployment indicators for Germany - the ILO comparable one, and the national German one - from the early 1990s to date. As can be seen the stall in GDP growth produced the rapid rise in umeployment after the summer of 2000, as win-win became lose-lose. I don't see why the picture shoud be that different this time round. The ageing population component in the slowdown will - if anything - be worse this time (the median age is higher). The labour market arguments are outlined in much more depth in this post.
1 comment:
I am not familiar with this author, but the point I believe he or she is making (you can't 'go back' and review the article once you're here, alas)is that Germans and the rest of the industrialized West cannot grasp a simple point: when you stop reproducing, economic troubles come. There comes a point when exporting to countries that still are reproducing fails to maintain production, when higher wages fails to maintain consumption and hence production, when cutting interest rates to zero fails to offset an inescapable debt that is a consequence also of failure to reproduce. If he wished, the author could also say, when attempts at robotization fails to offset the consequence of failure to reproduce, as Japan has learned, and that counting on certain uneducated and still reproducing niches of one's own country also fail, as India has learned and China is about to learn. Yes, we fail to grasp the point.
But the author appears to be unaware of how deeply the deliberate failure to reproduce weaves itself into all modern society. Into everything! Every modern "belief," the elaborate scaffold of self-deception modernists erect (when they can erect anything without chemical help and extreme porn), depends on failing to reproduce. It's like discovering every event breaks down into the number twenty-three. You would have to reverse practically every modern philosophical 'development' and return to a belief in God, a belief that motherhood is every bit as good as kung fu fighting, a belief again in monogamy, a belief again in scarlet A's. Yes. Women won't return now without an elaborate set of guarantees, and there are some societies where women will never return, regardless the incentives, because their cultures never recognized love ever (oh but keep those geisha movies coming). There's a web-site related to space colonies when one technocrat, considering the problem, said Oh it's simple, just make birth control pills illegal, just fail to order them. Like quality motherhood was some automatically functioning thing that kicked in and prevented a person from strangling the infant once born. No. Our western society was built on a delicate fulcrum, a little spirit of sacrifice from Christianity, a little ignorance of biology, a little chance to make a family. It's gone--oh, it's collapsing a little more slowly than Asia and Africa's. But this article describes the inevitable development in the rest of Europe. Only the US still maintains a tiny edge in the birth rate, and we aren't listening, we're cooperating fully in the final blows to the family.
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