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France called on Friday for more ambition from Germany in reforming the eurozone, saying Europe faced a “now or never” moment with rising external threats from the United States and China. French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire, speaking in German to a business conference in Berlin, offered the first official response from Paris to European reform proposals sketched out by Chancellor Angela Merkel in a weekend newspaper interview. He welcomed her support for the idea of a eurozone investment budget, one of French President Emmanuel Macron’s key demands, but said France and Germany had “a way to go” to reach...

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Papering over the structural imbalances in the Eurozone with endless bailouts will not resolve the fundamental asymmetries. Beneath the permanent whatever it takes "rescue" by the European Central Bank (ECB) lie fundamental asymmetries that doom the euro, the joint currency that has been the centerpiece of European unity since its introduction in 1999. The key imbalance is between export powerhouse Germany, which generates huge trade surpluses, and its trading partners, which run large trade and budget deficits, particularly Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain. Those outside of Europe may be surprised to learn that Germany's exports are roughly equal to...

Jean-Claude Juncker never lets others outshine him if he spots an opportunity to give the European project a boost. And that goes for friends and enemies alike. Indeed, the European Commission president has now come up with a project that not only transgressions the mandate given him by the leaders of the European Union member states, but also pits him against all the Eurozone finance ministers as well. Juncker was supposed to reach an agreement with finance ministers from the common currency area on proposals for deepening European integration he will present at the forthcoming EU summit later this month....

French President Emmanuel Macron and Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar say they are ready to discuss the contentious issue of taxing internet giants after a meeting in Paris. Macron is leading the tax charge in Europe, saying it’s not fair that internet companies don’t pay taxes where they make most of their money. Countries that serve as tax shelters for companies like Apple, including Ireland, have resisted the proposed measure. …

French finance minister Bruno Le Maire called Thursday for the European Union to become a cohesive whole, as unified and ambitious as the United States, adding that it was time for Britain to face the consequences of Brexit. The remarks come as the EU emerges from a rocky period of rising nationalism and challenges to its unity. Talks between the EU and Britain, which voted last year to secede, deadlocked in Brussels on Thursday, leaving future trade relations in doubt. “I think what we need within the Eurozone is more unity and more ambition,” Le Maire said during an event...

Despite the turbulence of the Weimar years, Germany has followed a steady capitalist economic model since the end of the Second World War. But that doesn’t mean people like the idea, a new study shows. Contrary to the US, where belief in capitalism is as entrenched as hot dogs and baseball, Germany has always had a more complicated relationship to the philosophy of competitive markets. This is, after all, the country that gave us the founding communist thinkers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. And a study published by Statista and YouGov on Tuesday shows that only 16 percent of Germans...

The German government will set up a new state-owned company which will provide startups with the money they need to transform a great idea into a successful business, Spiegel reports. As of 2018, startups will be able to apply to a new state-owned fund for the venture capital needed to accelerate the growth of their businesses, according to a government report seen by Spiegel. The company will be a subsidiary of the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW), the state-owned development bank, and is set to fill part of an estimated annual hole of €500 million to €600 million in venture capital...

Europe “must take its fate into its own hands” faced with a western alliance divided by Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidency, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Sunday. “The times in which we could completely depend on others are on the way out. I’ve experienced that in the last few days,” Merkel told a crowd at an election rally in Munich, southern Germany. “We Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands,” she added. While Germany and Europe would strive to remain on good terms with America and Britain, “we have to fight for our own destiny,” Merkel...

Core EU powers France and Germany vowed Monday to accelerate eurozone integration, with a new bilateral panel to work out ways to kickstart the reform process. “We’ve been talking about progress in eurozone integration for years, but things are not moving fast enough,” said France’s new Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire in Berlin after talks with his German counterpart Wolfgang Schäuble. “We have now decided to get things going more quickly and further in a very concrete manner,” he said. Schäuble agreed that “we are convinced that Germany and France must take a leading role” in strengthening the European Union...

Britain’s foreign secretary says Brussels may have to pay Britain for its exit from the European Union, rather than the other way around. Boris Johnson says Britain’s share of EU assets is so valuable that the EU may have to end up paying Britain when it leaves the bloc. He spoke to The Telegraph newspaper. […] The outspoken politician called Brussels “ruthless in its negotiating techniques” and said “they are going to play dirty.” …

With Germany raking in more taxes due to strong economic performance, the leader of its liberal party has suggested state officials are enriching themselves at the cost of the taxpayer. “The greed of the state has taken on kleptocratic characteristics,” Christian Lindner, head of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) told Handelsblatt on Wednesday. A kleptocracy is a form of government in which officials corruptly use public funds for personal gain. “The yearly tax intake of the state is set to be €100 billion higher in 2020 than this year, if we don’t act. For the FDP, it is clear that...

One in ten German firms present in Britain plans to stop investing in the island nation even before it definitively leaves the European Union, an industry group survey published on Tuesday found. German firms believe Brexit “will seriously damage business with the United Kingdom,” said Eric Schweitzer, president of the Association of German Chambers of Commerce and Industry (DIHK), which surveyed 2,200 internationally active companies. Some nine percent of firms who have invested in the UK plan to shift investments elsewhere, with Germany and the rest of the EU the top choices. Britain is the third-biggest export market for Germany...

A growing gap between rich and poor in Germany could sap social cohesion in Europe’s largest economy and most populous country, a government report warned on Thursday. “If the differences between poor and rich are felt to be too big in a society, and wealth seems mostly to be acquired without rewarding work, then acceptance of the economic and social order can shrink,” the labor ministry study said. […] In Germany, the richest 10 percent of households own more than half of all the wealth in the country, while the poorest 50 percent hold around 1.0 percent, Labor Minister Andrea...

Germany could take the United States to court if Washington goes ahead with plans to tax imports, Economy Minister Brigitte Zypries said Friday, hours before Chancellor Angela Merkel’s first meeting with Donald Trump. “I’m betting partly on reason and partly on the courts” to prevent a damaging trade war, Zypries told Deutschlandfunk public radio. The minister’s combative stance comes ahead of Merkel’s first meeting with Trump in Washington and a gathering of G20 finance ministers in Baden-Baden, western Germany, set to be dominated by the US president’s “America First” policy. […] If a US border tax was found to breach...

The German government told Washington it had the wrong address, after the US administration tried to enter talks with Germany on trade. “Trade policy is the responsibility of the European Union,” a spokesperson for the Economy Ministry told its US counterparts when they tried to open discussion on trade, Spiegel reported on Tuesday. Peter Navarro, who heads the White House’s new National Trade Council, called for bilateral talks to reduce the US trade deficit with Germany on Monday. The US recorded a $502-billion trade deficit last year, meaning it imported more than it exported. Germany, meanwhile, exported €253 billion ($270...

Germany’s Welt Am Sonntag newspaper has accused British finance minister Phillip Hammond of threatening to drastically slash corporation tax to turn the UK into an offshore tax haven if it is not given a trade deal. In an interview with Hammond, headlined “British finance minister threatens EU partners”, the paper quotes Hammond saying that Britain could be forced to change its economic model if negotiations went badly. “The British people are not going to lie down and say, ‘too bad’,” he said, when asked if the UK could slash corporation taxes. “If we have no access to the European market,...

The European Central Bank should begin winding down its expansive monetary policy in 2017 as inflation returns in the eurozone, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said in an interview on Friday. “It would probably be right if the ECB starts daring to head for the exit this year,” Schäuble told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper — although he acknowledged it would be a “difficult task”. The ECB has fixed interest rates at record lows in the 19-nation single currency area, as well as offering cheap loans to banks and buying up tens of billions of euros per month of government and...

Former Bundesbank president Hans Tietmeyer, a key architect of the euro who oversaw its introduction in Germany, has died at the age of 85, the central bank announced Wednesday. Tietmeyer ran the mighty Bundesbank from 1993 to 1999, a period that straddled the aftermath of German reunification as well as the launch of the single European currency and the creation of the European Central Bank. […] A fierce defender of the independence of central banks, Tietmeyer was credited with ensuring that the same principle was enshrined in the statutes of the ECB, which was modeled in large part on the...

The threat of “Brexit” is delivering a Christmas bonanza to Northern Ireland, where the thousands visiting daily from the euro-using Republic of Ireland are finding bargains driven by the battered pound. In the malls of Newry, a Northern Ireland town barely 5 miles (8 kilometers) from the United Kingdom’s only land border with a European Union partner, the surge in cross-border holiday shopping underscores how far the British currency has fallen amid anxiety over the country’s promised EU exit. While the euro is unusually weak against the resurgent dollar, the pound is far weaker, boosting price differentials on most goods....