Katja Hoyer: evaluation

Transcript context

…Now, there’s a common sense that the German Mittelstand, you would call it, is disappearing, that there’s more competition from China, and general employment in manufacturing is going down. A lot of German sectors, such as automobiles, don’t seem well poised to do well over the next 10 years. How pessimistic are you about that? It would be odd not to be pessimistic because all the experts are telling us to be pessimistic, as do the people in the field. You do see entire industries breaking away at the moment. There’s a huge issue, particularly with energy, that isn’t being addressed and isn’t being resolved. If you run a part of the economy that relies on stable and affordable energy, then there isn’t an obvious solution. This isn’t a temporary crisis that you just have to sit out and hope that it’ll go away. Actually, the structural things that are wrong with the German economy don’t seem to be going anywhere. I’m quite pessimistic at this point, but I’m hopeful that the election results that are coming in thick and fast now, and you begin to really see that in politicians, that it’s beginning to sink in just how pessimistic other people are and how fed up they are, that this is now hopefully leading to some reforms. There’s certainly talk of that at the moment in Germany. Say, at a deeper level, what do you think went wrong? German trains, they used to almost always be on time. Now they’re quite typically fairly late. Things Germany for a long time was very good at seem to be fraying. What’s the deepest structural model of what’s going on there?…

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