Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Germany Falls into Recession

cnn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 203 posts

Re: Germany Falls into Recession

#91

Post by slater »

politician wrote: post #89
mistrial9 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is called "hopium" one-liner.. look at the demographics.. twelve billionaires and 2.6 million adults having trouble paying monthly bills in my US West coastal area. Asset bubbles notably residential housing. capital-flight..

There is a trend that some people lean heavily on government intervention to solve their problems, rather than exercising personal initiative. This dependence can exacerbate issues in densely populated regions, where high living costs, limited housing, and food security concerns are rampant, despite surprisingly low out-migration rates. However, alternatives are readily available. Inland areas beyond the coastlines o…

> There is a trend that some people lean heavily on government intervention to solve their problems

But enough about government subsidies given to Elon!

Re: Germany Falls into Recession

#92

Post by p-e-w »

We need new terminology to distinguish between macroeconomic recessions and living standard recessions. Traditionally, those two things are more or less intertwined, so the term "recession" carries connotations of both. With the steady increase of economic inequality, the link between the two meanings becomes less and less firm.

The median living standard in Germany has been in free fall for 20 years. By that criterion, the country (like many other Western countries) has been in a continuous recession since 9/11. By macroeconomic numbers, however, Germany has experienced several booms in between, which can easily be used to create the (intentionally) misleading narrative that "the economy" (insofar as it affects the median individual) is "sometimes up, sometimes down", when in reality there has been a continuous downtrend for a very long time.

Re: Germany Falls into Recession

#93

Post by amadeuspagel »

pulse7 wrote: post #86
modernpink wrote: post #65

China is outcompeting Germany as a manufacturer of high value goods, particularly cars [1][2]. Last year it overtook Germany as the second biggest car exporter. In the first three months of this year, China has surpassed Japan to become the world's top car exporter for the first time. This is due to its strength in EVs (while Germany's strength is in ICEs). Volkswagen holds a 2% share of the Chinese EV market while t…

...and all this happened because German car makes were willing to give COMPLETE KNOW-HOW (on how to make good cars) just to be able to sell in Chinese market... Now China has learned how to make good (enough) cars and - they will out-compete Germans with low prices... Who wants to pay 60.000€ for an electric car in you can get one for 30.000€ from China?

It happened because German car makers were not willing to commit to electric cars.

Re: Germany Falls into Recession

#95

Post by vikingerik »

As a reminder: any year-over-year economic numbers still need to consider pandemic effects. Current numbers look bad when the baseline of a year ago was artificially high.

The pandemic shutdowns caused pent-up demand that became time-shifted, causing anomalously high results for that time period, and so year-over-year numbers a year later look worse. For the US, that happened starting in summer 2021, and thus we had that apparent recession in 2022 as those numbers were compared to 2021's artificially high baseline. The same is now happening for Germany, since the shutdowns lifted later in most of Europe, such that the early-2022 numbers had that time-shifted effect so that the early-2023 numbers seem to look bad.

(To illustrate the point: remember the "great resignation"? That wasn't a real effect, that was a statistical artifact of pent-up demand for normal job switching that didn't happen during the pandemic.)

For a real comparison, compare this year's numbers to 2019 and you'll see that economic growth looks fairly normal for a four-year period.

Re: Germany Falls into Recession

#96

Post by ThorsBane »

jonp888 wrote: post #82
ThorsBane wrote: post #39

They shouldn't be shutting down nuclear. Build more nuclear reactors. That will provide more clean energy and a lot of jobs. Modernize the grid. Make it a smarter grid that is more resilient to harm. These projects pay for themselves quickly and are easy to finance with how much wealth Germany has.

What is about HackerNews and the obesession with the decision to remove Nuclear Power, which was only a minority component at it's peak, from the German energy mix, as somehow being the dominant factor in the entire German society and economy? A while back someone unironically described Germany's nuclear power policy as "the single most catastrophic decision ever made by any government in peacetime".

The French regret their decisions on this front. It took a war for them to realize their huge mistake regarding energy independence.

Germany is repeating the same mistake because of pride. If there are still talks about needing to use fossil fuels to bridge the gap introduced by eliminating nuclear, then eliminating nuclear was clearly the wrong move. The reactors should be maintained, upgraded, and worked on so that there's a lot of employment and a lot of clean, independent energy.

Re: Germany Falls into Recession

#97

Post by mschild »

foxtacles wrote: post #87
mschild wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The greens haven't been part of the national government for decades until 2021. I disagree with their decision to not keep the nuclear reactors running, but if you want to point fingers at people it's not them that unilaterally decided to stop building new reactors.

That's technically correct, however much of the Greens' ideology has been gradually adopted by essentially all other political parties over the past 10-15 years, most likely since it's rather popular with the voters here. There's no political party left you could vote for if you are in favor of nuclear.

Right and their ideology is to build more solar and wind. Which, even when factoring in the cost of batteries, is cheaper than nuclear or almost any other form of energy.

https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth

Re: Germany Falls into Recession

#98

Post by barbazoo »

mschild wrote: post #97
foxtacles wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's technically correct, however much of the Greens' ideology has been gradually adopted by essentially all other political parties over the past 10-15 years, most likely since it's rather popular with the voters here. There's no political party left you could vote for if you are in favor of nuclear.

Right and their ideology is to build more solar and wind. Which, even when factoring in the cost of batteries, is cheaper than nuclear or almost any other form of energy. https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth

All true. In hindsight though I wish the political debate had considered climate change more seriously in plans how to phase out coal and nuclear.

Re: Germany Falls into Recession

#99

Post by mantas »

c00lio wrote: post #84
sottol wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the alternative? Brexit for everyone?

Maybe not outright exiting the EU. But maybe exiting the Eurozone and removing some other problematic economic straightjackets like overly large tax-financed subsidies.

Or at least several different eurozones. Germany and Italy or Spain are rather different economies to say the least.

Re: Germany Falls into Recession

#100

Post by j-pb »

modernpink wrote: post #65

China is outcompeting Germany as a manufacturer of high value goods, particularly cars [1][2]. Last year it overtook Germany as the second biggest car exporter. In the first three months of this year, China has surpassed Japan to become the world's top car exporter for the first time. This is due to its strength in EVs (while Germany's strength is in ICEs). Volkswagen holds a 2% share of the Chinese EV market while t…

> the shut down of nuclear power thanks to the Greens

The decision to shut down our nuclear reactors came from a conservative government, where the greens were in the opposition.

The prices have not been rising due to the shutdown of our nuclear plants, but due to price gauging by electrical companies, and due to russia falling away as a cheap gas supplier.

Nuclear only made up 5% of our energy production 2023 and 11% in 2021, with ~4.3Gw and ~8.5Gw respectively. Germany installed 7.2Gw of PV and ~2.4Gw of Wind in 2022. Replacing our entire nuclear capacity with renewables within a single year.

The conservative government of the last 20 years spend an insane amount of effort to stop renewables by limiting the yearly installed PV capacity by law, and introducing NIMBY friendly limitations on where wind turbines can be build, bloating the documents required for clearance from a couple dozen pages to a full binder.

The conservative government were also the ones starting the NordStream projects and overseeing their construction. They are directly culpable for our dependence on russia.

The greens have to spend a lot of effort on reversing those legislations, and they had to do this in addition to handling the Ukraine crisis, and while constantly fighting a conservative/neoliberal party that is part of the government but has made it their stated goal to sabotage everything the greens propose. (They are basically a lobby arm of the german car industry, with several scandals.)

The fact that they managed to push for this much renewable energy, and for this much energy independence is a small miracle tbh.

Also if the conservatives hadn't sabotaged our "Energiewende" and had guided our car industry towards EV, we wouldn't have the issues you pointed out.

Post reply on HN