What We're Reading

The vote has come and gone. A major European nation has chosen to leave the EU. The markets have had their obligatory decline. A weekend has passed. It is time to think about what exactly has happened… and what it means, if anything.

The real drive to leave had little to do with economics. It had a great deal to do with immigration. The EU’s economy has been in wretched condition since 2008.

The EU has been unable to forge a plan that would fix dire unemployment in southern Europe and revive the stagnant economy. The EU’s founding treaty promised prosperity. It has failed. Germany has the healthiest economy in Europe, but even it struggles to grow.

The case for staying in the EU was that leaving would ruin the British economy. This assumed, of course, that staying in a broken union would help the economy. The logic of that escaped me. It is hard to see any economic benefits that would be lost. As I put it in my book Flashpoints, “Britain will avoid the destabilization in Europe by pull

If Germany is the European leader, one can easily see how this bodes for the rest across the pond as well as DEMAND for goods and services coming out of the U.S.

According to Reuters Ifo economist Klaus Wohlrabe said on Monday he expected zero growth in the fourth quarter in Germany and that there were almost no bright spots for German industry at present.  "Things have not gone well for German industry and there are no bright spots for industry," he said. (click chart to enlarge)

Business sentiment darkened in October for a sixth month running, according to the Munich-based Ifo think-tank's business climate index, which fell to 103.2 from 104.7 the previous month. That was its weakest reading since December 2012.

Wohlrabe said recent upward momentum in the Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) for Germany was not yet visible. Only firms' export expectations had risen slightly, he said, although it remained to be seen if this was sustainable.

Hans-Werner Sinn, President of Germany’s Ifo In

(edited 1:18pm to add U.S. projections)

Germans have now achieved goals, which coal industry skeptics have been claiming for the last 40 years could not be achieved even by 2050 and is is rapidly becoming a model country for transitions to renewable and sustainable energy proving that "yes, a transition to a renewable energy economy can be done, and it can be down with continuous improvement to existing technology.

Germans have a special word for it -"'Energiewende', or energy transformation - which aims to power the entire country by renewable resources by 2050." Germans are now laying down a challenge for other countries saying there is no longer any excuse for countries to say this is impossible.

June 6, 2014 was a record breaking day for the solar power industry in Germany when the country broke through the symbolic barrier of generating more than 50% of its total electricity needs with solar power for one hour in an all time record, according to Tobias Rothachter, and expert on r

A huge slowdown in Germany is on the way, yet few see it. Steen Jakobsen, chief economist at Saxo bank writes via email ...

Back from major trip to Brazil, Uruguay, US and Spain.

The one thing which to me is being ignored by the market is the coming slow-down in Germany. The market can of course go up in times of weaker growth, but my big “thing” is that no one believes Germany economically is slowing despite very negative macro changes in the last twelve months:

• The China rebalancing will cost Germany export volume.
• Germany has the most expensive energy policy in Europe – a drive away from atomic power dependency to a less obvious dependency on Russian gas.
• The Ukraine crisis impacts Germany. According to the Federation of German Wholesale, Foreign Trade and Services (BGA) about 6.200 German companies are doing business in Russia.
• The coming Chinese devaluation of the Yuan will significantly lift Chinese import prices.

I had to write a monthly OP-ED for Swiss Financial newspaper

As if Merkel didn't have a difficult enough road ahead of her running up to September's elections, Berlin politicians have now signaled to coalition partners their interest in a bilateral movement away from austerity and towards stimulus in the form of low-interest loans and venture capital.

The fact that the finance minister and the chancellor are suddenly willing to do things that have been off-limits until now also has something to do with an internal Chancellery dossier from mid-May. The government headquarters had asked the ministries to take stock of the EU growth pact that was approved in June 2012 to support the austerity programs. The results were, in fact, supposed to demonstrate how well the German bailout strategy was working. But the officials' conclusions shocked even calculated optimists. In their report, they painstakingly documented that debt-ridden countries, especially those that have not taken advantage of EU bailout programs, have hardly made any progress in terms