Posted on 02/15/2010 7:50:42 PM PST by reaganaut1
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Here in Germany, opinion surveys show that two-thirds of the people oppose financial assistance for Greece. More ominously, a survey released Sunday by the newspaper Bild showed that a slight majority of Germans, 53 percent, said they favored expelling Greece from the euro group entirely if its mountain of debt threatened the stability of the currency union.
“Every country has its own debts,” said Kristin Lautenschläger, 70, a retiree in Berlin who said she opposed spending German money to save Greece. “Germany is no longer such a rich country anymore, and has its own problems to deal with before it can take care of Greece’s.”
Germans spent the past decade cutting unemployment benefits and freezing pensions, while grudgingly accepting stagnant wages in order to make their economy more competitive. After those years of sacrifice, it is more than just a matter of money that is driving opposition to the bailout, but also a matter of principle, after politicians promised they would never have to prop up their neighbors.
The crisis could not have come at a worse moment for Chancellor Angela Merkel. At the outset of the financial crisis, Mrs. Merkel confidently called it an American problem, and resisted as much as possible calls from across the Atlantic for even more government spending to kick-start economic growth.
Now with the American economy in the midst of a more robust, if still fragile, recovery, the Germany economy has stalled, with no growth in the fourth quarter, according to an announcement Friday by the government statistics office.
“There was a belief in the beginning that this was an American problem. I don’t think the dots were connected across Europe, that you have the unpredictability within the zone itself,” said Jackson Janes, executive director of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Now they're being asked to bail out Greece......
Any noise to dump the Euro and bring back the DM?
Not that I have heard yet, but I haven’t talked to them in weeks.
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