Germany not free of blame for the crisis

The bankruptcy of US investment bank Lehman Brothers wasn't what plunged the world into the crisis. The problem was liberalised financial markets and low-consumption countries like Germany, writes the left-liberal Frankfurter Rundschau: "The thesis that Germany was solidly positioned and thus slipped into the crisis through no fault of its own is the third Lehman lie. A glance at the real economy makes that clear. In the past decade the global economy grew primarily because America could consume more than it produced. This growth was financed by almost worthless securities bought by countries that produced more than they consumed, with China, Germany and Japan at the top of the list. As long as these countries don't fill the global gap in demand with higher consumption, the global economy will not see sustainable recovery. Permanent export surpluses of the kind targeted by the German economy are just as responsible for the crisis as their counterpart, the permanent trade deficits in Anglo-Saxon countries."

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