Posts Tagged ‘germany’

German finance minister Schauble warns of fiscal crackdown – Tax Cut Plan of Merkel’s Government not well recieved – Greece’s problems make Germany look good

Friday, December 18th, 2009

Berlin  18 –12 –2009

Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, has warned of a severe fiscal crackdown after the immediate effects of the economic crisis are over, and has said that combating a budget deficit in these times could not be done using old conventional means.

Experts have been sharply critical of the planned tax cut legislation by Germany’s coalition government of conservative CDU and the pro-business FDP.

Mr Schäuble presented his draft 2010 federal budget which predicts a   federal deficit of 86 billion Euro. This is somewhat less than had been predicted but almost previous record high of 1996.

The Merkel government faces a severe challenge from 2011 onward because of fiscal rules which it itself had enshrined into the German constitution and will force it to cut spending every year until 2016. [ouch!]

Fighting this deficit will require a great effort the finance minister has said and comes during the government’s declared determination to prepare the public for unpopular spending cuts that could even erode Germany’s generous welfare system.

Hopefully the billions being wasted on a futile Afghani Nato mission with no future,- including paying compensation in millions of Euros for German caused civilian deaths- will recieve as close scrutiny as domestic cost cutting.

It is still not sure if this particular tax package could obtain the majority required in the upper house of parliament in which Germany’s 16 regional ‘Lander’ governments are represented, to become law.

By comparison, Germany’s government finances have not been hit as hard as some of other EU members by the international economic crisis.

Misery loves company, and as a small comfort, Greece provided it.

By comparison the fiscal problems in Greece are even worse than the German ones and the German finance minister has advised Greece to take a hard and difficult line to implement public austerity programs.

Greece has been struggling with a rising public budget deficit that is forecast to reach 13% of GDP for 2009. This is a record for countries in the euro zone and well above the 3% budget deficit limit set by the EU budget rules.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Berlin, News | No Comments »

WestLB – German Landesbank admits its a basket-case!

Friday, December 4th, 2009

To stop it falling into insolvency, the WestLB, based in Dusseldorf, will be the first German bank to use federal government aid.

A “Landesbank” is a German bank controlled by the regional state governments. The WestLB Bank is owned by the state government of North Rhine Westphalia and that state’s non-profit public savings banks.

It had at one time visions to become an international player but instead made all the stupid mistakes that all other stupid banking upstarts made and followed the lemmings off the cliff in  the so-called “Global Financial Crisis”.

Whether it became a victim to the easy credit conditions, the sub-prime lending, deregulation, sleeping so-called regulators in the US, predatory lending , over-leveraged debt burdens or the boom and bust of the shadow banking system – or all of the above – nobody knows for sure.However the WestLB Bank screwed up enough to have about 85 billion Euros of “distressed-credit” declared on its books and hence the government bailout.

The exact fine details will still to be worked out in this rescue plan and those “bad” parts of the bank having to be finally identified by the other German landesbanks and the federal government, through its bank rescue arm SoFFin.

BaFin, Germany’s powerfull banking regulator has the authority to close struggling banks and nationalize them, but because of  this bailout has thus far avoided having to step in.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Berlin, News | No Comments »

British troops to be withdrawn from Germany if Conservatives win next UK election

Friday, November 27th, 2009

British troops would be pulled from Germany – nearly 70 years after the end of WWII – if the Conservatives win the next British election according to their shadow Defence Secretary Dr Liam Fox. He said it was no longer necessary to maintain the presence of more than 20,000 military personnel and ending the commitment would free up forces to carry out other Nato operations.

Generations of British soldiers and their families have spent time in Germany which is now in the main based in Herford near Bielefeld.

Dr Fox would like new Nato member states from eastern and central Europe, particularly Poland, to take over Britain’s commitments in Germany.Quite how Germany would feel about having Polish, Czech or Romanian troops permanently stationed on its soil the “almost” minister did not or could not say.

Britain has become almost a 2nd-rate military power and does not have the economic clout to compete with militarily with the likes of Russia, China and upcoming economic powers like Brazil and India.

More commendable and more realistic from the upstart shadow minister is the fact that he has asked the civil service to envisage cutting the defence department’s administrative costs by 25% before 2012.

This will certainly raise the ire of all the Humphrey Appelbys and provide more money for the treasury to spend -hopefully where it is sorely needed namely to improve the 3rd rate backward infrastructure all over Britain.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Berlin, News | No Comments »

90 yr-old German charged for 1945 Nazi crime

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

The state court in Duisburg said prosecutors  there have on Tuesday charged a 90-year-old former SS soldier with for the murder of  58 Jewish forced labourers  near the town of Deutsch-Schuetzen in Austria on the last days of World War II.

The remains of the victims of the Deutsch Schuetzen massacre were found in 1995 in a mass grave by the Austrian Jewish association. A plaque now marks the site.

The man – reportedly with the rather unfortunate Nazi-sounding name of “Adolf Storms” – has not yet been officially been named by the court but it has been published by the German media.

The Court has said they have two weeks to decide whether the evidence as presented to them by the prosecutors supports the charges sufficiently to bring the case to trial, which is normal practice in Germany. A lawyer acting for Mr Storms issued no immediate response to the charges. nor whether he will appeal against the case proceeding further.

At the time of the murders, March 1945, the retreating Nazis were desperately trying to cover their tracts evacuating concentration camps. They forced weak and hungry prisoners on exhausting marches and killed many who could no longer walk.

Der Spiegel magazine in an article last October reported that state prosecutors were warned about Storms involvement in the killings because of the investigations put in place by a 28-year-old Austrian student, Andreas Forster.

Forster interviewed Storms for several days without telling the elderly man the real nature of his inquiries. He duly informed the proscecutors in July and the police raided his house in December.

Prosecutors have alleged that he not a mere lackey obeying orders but was a driven National Socialist ideologue and considered his victims “of low value” .

In  two related incidents in Germany, in October, the 88 year old former SS soldier Heinrich Boere went on trial in the western city of Aachen for gunning down three Dutch resistance fighters in 1944. He admitted responsibility but said he  “was just following orders”, which hopefully the court will also do and throw him in jail for the remainder of his life.

And this August, a 90-year-old former German army commander was jailed for the rest of his life for ordering a massacre of Italian civilians in 1944. Troops under his direct command shot a 74-year-old woman and three men in the street before forcing 11 males aged between 15 and 66 into the ground floor of a farmhouse which they then blew up. Only the youngest of the boys survived.

Another open case which has yet to be taken to court concerns a German citizen a certain Soeren Kam. He directly participated in the murder of anti-Nazi Danish newspaper editor Carl Henrik Clemmensen.This Danish patriot had stolen the population registry of the Danish Jewish Community which would have facilitated the roundup and subsequent deportation of Danish Jews to Nazi concentration camps, where many were murdered.

Kam was indicted in Denmark for the murder of Clemmensen, but a German court refused to approve his extradition to stand trial in Copenhagen. At the request of the Wiesenthal Center, the Danish judicial authorities are conducting an investigation of his role in the deportation of those Jews.

Hopefully Mr Kam will be joining Mr Boere and possibly Mr Storms in jail very soon.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Berlin, News | No Comments »

A400M makes some progress – but not yet out of the fog

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

Airbus Military – the military side of EADS- on Thursday successfully ran all 4 engines of its new A400M military transporter plane’s engines and thus operated the aircraft completely autonomously for the first time. This is a good sign for an eventual maiden flight in December this year.

The A400M airlifter – the European successor to the ubiquitous Hercules C-130- has been delayed almost four years by problems with its new engines and other technical glitches.  The contract is for 180 planes - 60 of them for Germany – the others for France, Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg, the U.K., and Turkey.

However the A400 has had more than just technical problems. There have been numerous financial cost over-runs  [totaling about 2.3 billion Euro!!!!!!] which have nearly collapsed the whole project on several occasions.

Only large dull-witted European governments could be so stupid as to go along with the mounting costs and delays which have been imposed by EADS .  Any normal commercial contract of this size with these cost over-runs and delays would have sunk years ago.

The Airbus parent EADS is now in talks with the governments who have ordered the aircraft to rescue the 20 billion Euro contract.  There have been rumours that Airbus is willing to divide the delivery into two instalment payments to ease the financial burden on the purchasing countries and also to avert the complete collapse of the project.

The German government has invited officials from all the countries involved to hold another round of talks on the A400M in Berlin at beginning of December. Watch this space.

While the neither the tax payers of Europe nor the stock-holders of Boeing will be laughing – but on a somewhat lighter note – an Irish bookmaker will take bets on whether Boeing’s  787 “Dreamliner” or  the Airbus’ A400M  transport will fly first.

Both programs have faced repeated over-runs and both are now – depending on which rumour you want to believe, due to fly before the end of 2009.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Berlin, News | No Comments »

Berlin attempting to stop EU bank information being transferred to US

Sunday, November 15th, 2009

The German Justice Minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, has let it be known that Berlin will attempt to stop a proposed EU bank information transfer to the US. Similar sentiment has been expressed by the Austrian interior minister Maria Fekter, who said she would also oppose the deal. Because of privacy concerns France and Finland are also opposing the proposed agreement.

The German minister is critical on both its timing and its substance. She wants to distance Germany from the “SWIFT” agreement and says it is unfortunate that the EU is trying to rail-road this through according to the <<old rules>> just days before the Lisbon Treaty is activated. Postponement of the deal beyond 30 November will have the legal implication that the European Parliament will have a bigger say in the decision-making process once the Lisbon Treaty enters into force on 1 December.

She also has problems with the substance of the deal and remains critical of how the extent of information transferred to the US will affect account holders whose data has been recorded and their lack of legal recourse.

At the present time a Belgium-based company, called “SWIFT” has kept a backup database in the US, which the Bush administration set up to keep track of “terrorist investigations”. The company records international bank transactions for trillions of dollars everyday in over 200 countries. It is planning to open a Switzerland-based data-centre, which will mean that the European information will no longer have to be stored in the US. The Obama administration wants to negotiate a legal framework for data exchange with the EU.

Since 2006, SWIFT has been in the centre of a major EU-US row because the American government has been secretly using information on European bank transactions as part of the so-called “War on Terror” – a left-over from the dis-credited Bush presidency.

The so-called “ War on Terror”  -the failed misnomer of a hardly literate president – became a stock characterization, a finger-print of the Bush administration to justify any number of illegal activities at home and abroad. It was also used to snoop on its allies and it seems that this policy has since then been comprehensively discarded by the Obama administration

Tags: , ,
Posted in Berlin, News | No Comments »

Germany remember footballer Enke with dignity and respect

Friday, November 13th, 2009

In Hannover today circa 35,000 people took part in a solemn procession to pay their last respects to Robert Enke, goalie of football club Hannover-96 who committed suicide earlier this week.

It says a lot about Germany in the civilized and dignified way they have dealt with this tragedy. No phony letters or any opportunistic interventions from politicians trying to make cheap political gains – just a quiet, but very powerful remembrance walk from the centre of the city to the Hannover-96 stadium.

Germany was to have played a friendly against Chile this Saturday but the game has been cancelled out of respect of Enke’s death. This fact – the national team stands to lose money they badly need – is another refreshing sign of a humanitarian society where people are put ahead of sport and money.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Berlin, News, Sport | No Comments »

Chancellor Merkel Says <Wurst> yet to come

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

A “reality-sandwich” was delivered to the German people earlier today by the leader of their government Angela Merkel. This after the last couple of days of euphoric international attention and celebration to commemorate the reunification of the two Germanys, 20 years ago. She did not mince her words when she addressed the German Parliament and gave a rather pessimistic review of the present domestic economic situation the country finds itself in and saying that the woes in the global financial markets could hit severely Germany in 2010.

In her first policy speech since her re-election two weeks ago, she gave a dismal assessment of the German economy – this clearly a U-turn from her words earlier this year, who was then facing re-election. At that time she clearly stated that Germany would weather any financial storm which may arise.

Her one hour speech did not mince words – Germany has some way to go before emerging from the economic crisis saying that…” the problems will get bigger before things get better.” She spoke of an unprecedented challenge – the largest since reunification. She mentioned the immense costs relating to the integration and enhancment of  social and economic conditions of the former East Germany. Up to now this has already cost the nation €1 trillion.

She said that……….“without growth, [there would be] no investment and without growth, no jobs; without growth, no money for education; without growth, no support for the weak.”

Currently unemployment stands at 8.3 percent, which she says will rise even further.

The government will introduce tax cuts amounting to circa €24 billion for fiscal year 2010 and increased in 2011. These tax cuts come despite the growing German budget deficit.

In 2011, the German government plans to embark on changes to the tax system that will entail lowering taxation rates but also overhauling a system notorious for its complexity. The new system tax system Merkel has promised is to be simplified, lower and fairer.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Berlin, News | No Comments »

One sixth of voters in last federal election in Germany would now have voted differently

Monday, November 9th, 2009

After winning the federal election on 27th September, circa 1/6th of the electorate now say they would vote differently if given the choice again – and would chose another political party.

It has also become clear since the election that Chancellor Angela Merkel had won her second-term in large part because of the failure of the Social Democratic SPD to turn-out their traditional core voters.

The SPD seems to have lost around 10 million votes compared to the election in 1998, when Gerhard Schroeder won and formed a coalition government with the Green party. Of this amount itseems that in the 27th September election this year, around two million SPD voters simply stayed at home.

This was the worst turnout for decades in what by all accounts was considered as the most boring in years – hence a lot of the apparent apathy.  Of Germany’s 62.2 million eligible voters, turnout was at a record low of 71 percent against 78 percent four years ago. The all time high in recent elections was in 1972 with 91 percent.

According to a poll in the Bild am Sonntag newspaper, almost 16 percent of respondents were, after the fact, unhappy with their vote. There was disparity between former East German and West German voters polled. Most of the discontent [28%] was attributed to East German respondents, while a lesser amount [13%] was recorded in the West.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Berlin, News | 1 Comment »