Germany has had a devalued euro which has allowed it to export at the expense of both the US and the rest of Europe. If it still had its own currency it would not find itself so reliant on exporting. This has not been good for industry outside of Germany. Ultimately it will not be good for Germany either.
I hope that if or when the coronavirus hits Europe like in China, we have a few treatment options to lower death rates and a vaccine coming quickly. Same of course for the U.S. but I fear that, given how this president manages crises based on hard data and the best expertise, another China outbreak unfolding here is more ominous.
3
If we could shutdown factories for couples of months each year, maybe that could help the environment.
3
@bay1111uq
Nature bats last!
3
The coronavirus epidemic has highlighted what Trump refuses to recognize.
The world economy depends on China.
Trump doesn't like that.
So his attitude and policies toward trade, tariffs, and deficits are naive and reckless. Trump's bullying - "America is the greatest" and "we don't need them" - will destroy all of us.
The world economy could crater if we don't oust him in 2020 and return to being part of the world.
15
Sorry, but what a rubbish article.
If an economy has made itself dependent on Chinese imports and China as an export market it is the USA.
The EU is far more self sustained.
This can be proven by a few economic statistics.
I would also argue that the US health care system and the governance under Trump will not be able to face a global pandemic. Europe is much better equipped for such things.
What is the point of such articles?
6
As tragic as it may be with this outbreak, many places in China will see blue skies! Most of the polluting transport systems and factories have been shut down.
9
Economics means China cannot be treated as the biggest enemy of the West, UK and NATO and at the same time as a vital financial support. But it is true you can hate your ex-spouse while accepting their money.
2
Another exacerbating factor is that the world is so highly leveraged that I doubt anyone has a handle on it. This could get very ugly very fast.
6
It appears that a virus that may have originated in a wet market in China may tip a market consisting of hundreds of millions of people halfway across the world in Europe into a recession, with all the human suffering that innocent-sounding word conceals.
There seems to have been a monumental, systemic failure in risk management in designing the architecture of the global economy over the past 25 years.
And we're only beginning what will be a long and painful process of reckoning with the consequences.
3
EU economy has been stagnating for a long time already. In the past decade average EU growth rate was only half that of US, which was itself anemic. EU elites and their suporters are far more concerned with achieving ethno-cultural suicide (ME-African mass-settlement) and economic suicide (unilaterally cutting emissions for the greater global good), than they have been with keeping up technologically and otherwise. It is a basketcase, only masked by ECB rates of -.6% a decade into a global recovery. Shock of coronavirus may be just another nail in the coffin.
8
@Joe
And here we go again with the EU bashing. “Elites”, and “ethno-cultural suicide”, and how idiotic of them to think about global warming. It also seems you look forward to a European recession. I wonder where your hostile attitude toward another continent comes from.
9
I'm first- that's exciting! Europe has had sluggish growth for many years now. And yes, this virus could push the economy down even further. And there are lessons for the US. For all of those who continue to hold up Europe as an economic model for the US to follow, please note the lack of growth, essentially since the great recession of 2008. Germany has been limping along for a long time and only Macron seems to have the nerve to take on the unions and stodgy bureaucracy. But even he has gotten bogged down, and it is unclear if most of Europe will ever turn this around again.
4
This article inadvertently shows something else that is wrong with the world. The economy depends on people making things -- automobiles -- that we really should not need or use. One irony is that Germany itself has one of the best public transport systems in the world and that a substantial group of its citizens support the Green Party. The challenge is to build prosperous societies that are sustainable instead of pushing us towards extinction.
27
‘One of the best public transport systems’. Really?
2