Can you talk an economy down? (just look at Germany)

Now, now. Germany as the most exciting place to invest in Europe? Huh, I must have missed something here. "Germany comes out top because of its infrastructure, educated workforce, political stability and dedication to research and development." Those fascinating news are revealed by a recent study by Ernst & Young, a consulting company.

For years, Germany has been described as the "sick man of Europe", the Kassandras of doom being legion. The reforms proposed and adopted, though, did not focus on either infrastructure (budget cuts) nor an educated workforce (tuition fees) nor in political stability (cuts in healthcare and unemployment benefits below the poverty line), and I'm not even talking about dedication to research and development. It was about long years without increasing wages, major cuts in public investment and social security.

So now we know that a good infrastructure and an educated workforce is not so bad after all. And somehow this has even been understood by business leaders (The "study" is in fact a survey of 1,019 CEOs). Good.

I blame the conservative hysteria-machine of being partly responsible for what has been going on in the Westeuropean economies. The politics of reform have heavily depended on an "argument of crisis", creating a completely exaggerated feeling of crisis, that in turn could be mended with neoliberal "reforms".

This is, one might argue, politics. If a group can better convince the public of it's world view, then they deserve to push through their policies. But the sad truth is that the so-called reforms are brutally and outrageously failing. The German Hartz-reforms of the labor market are so costly and so ineffective that the German government will have no choice than to reform the reforms.

And as the huge cuts in social services and the outrageously wrong results of the last tide of reforms have created wide-spread insecurity that led to restraint in domestic demand and let to years of slow growth, the fact that they fucked up the political systems and the labor market so much that the chaos and insecurity will be bound to even grow.

The ongoing creation of fear by the neoliberal hysteria-machine has not only led to "reforms" that are ineffective at the least, it had also a negative impact on the economy that, in my opinion, cannot be overestimated. The fear-politics that dominated German economic policies in recent years has failed gloriously, except in one thing: they managed to talk the economy down. Even Ernst&Young's CEO-poll shows this. Now it's about time to bury the imbecile policies of neoliberalism.