johnm wrote:
The point is that Germany has succeeded in building both a government surplus and a balance of payments surplus through intelligent long term investment in industry at all levels.
And the artificial devaluation of its currency against its peers didn't help at all did it? After the disaster of the decision to make one East German Mark equal to one West German Mark following reunification, the happy coincidence of the Euro being so favourable to the German export market is probably just that and Khol only pushed it because he was thinking of others.
Your refusal to accept that the surplus is illegal under EU law, has been growing illegally for years, disadvantages Germany's neighbours, is the direct result of the Euro, and that the lack of action by the EU to enforce its own laws on Germany whilst strictly and punitively enforcing them on smaller nations, at least to some degree with German encouragement, is irritating, but not as much as your insistence that Germany should be held up as some paragon of economic virtue. It is, in EU terms, more akin to a bandit state.
The pathetic performance in Westminster is hopefully the start of the dawning realisation that we aren't victims, our injuries are entirely self inflicted.
That at least is true. Joining the EU was indeed a self-inflicted wound, hopefully soon to be healed.
Interestingly, Mervyn King, a long serving former BofE governor, said in a speech to the LSE yesterday that leaving the EU represented "real opportunities" for economic reform in the UK and called for us to leave both the single market and the customs union.
(He also had some interesting things to say about the way that proper debate on EU membership had been stifled by politicians and that this caused a Brexit vote to be inevitable).
Of course, 10 years as BofE governor may not mean that he knows what he is talking about on our economy and he should have deferred to johnm.
PW