Germany's new boom: making money by making stuff
Germany's new boom: making money by making stuff; UK and US increasingly relied on the financial sector, Germany concentrated on manufacturing. Now – following the most successful year for Europe's biggest economy since the euphoria that followed reunification two decades ago – that looks like the sort of prediction English football fans make ahead of each World Cup: premature, based on little more than wishful thinking – and wrong. "We will have a golden decade now," says Hans-Werner Sinn, president of Munich's Ifo Institute, one of the country's leading thinktanks. Sinn wrote a book early in the last decade, when unemployment was high and pessimism rampant, called Can Germany be Saved? His view then was that it could be. Now he says it has been.
The phrase "crisis, what crisis" also springs to mind outside the Audi plant an hour up the autobahn in Ingolstadt, where a happy band of German motorists have turned up to pick up their new cars, fresh off a one-kilometre production line churning out 2,500 vehicles a day, six days a week. "2010 was our best ever year," says Jurgen de Graeve, Audi's head of communications. "At the beginning of last year it was clear the market was about to turn up but we didn't expect it to happen so fast."