Episode 105: Kaput – What is Wrong with the German Economy? with Wolfgang Münchau

Global Economy Podcast

ECIPE

Business

4.2 • 5 Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode of the Global Economy Podcast is a recording of a recent webinar where Fredrik Erixon spoke with Wolfgang Münchau on the state of the German economy. The German economy is in a bad shape. Its Gross Domestic Product has fallen for two consecutive years and once-mighty German industrial companies struggle to keep up with technological change and global competition. What has gone wrong? In a new book – Kaput: The End of the German Miracle – Wolfgang Münchau argues that Germany’s economic problems go deep and have evolved over a longer period of time. Its manufacturing-first mentality is entrenched and keeps a hold over the country’s economic imagination – leading to false perceptions about the economy and slow responses to new technological developments. You can watch a video recording of the conversation here. Wolfgang Münchau is the director and co-founder of Eurointelligence, a service that provides daily information about the euro area, targeted at investors and policymakers. He is also the European columnist for the New Statesman, and previously an associate editor and columnist for the Financial Times. Wolfgang was one of the founding members of Financial Times Deutschland, the German language business daily, where he served as deputy editor from 1999 until 2001, and as editor-in-chief from 2001 until 2003. He previously worked as foreign correspondent in Washington DC and Brussels for the Times, and in Frankfurt for the FT. Wolfgang’s latest book, Kaput, published by Swift Press, is about the rise and decline of the German economy. Wolfgang and his wife, Susanne Mundschenk, live in Oxford.

Transcript

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0:00.0	All right. Hello, everyone and welcome to this conversation about the German economy and about a book that was published last year on Germany's economic misery and why the country
0:22.0	find itself in a structural economic slump.
0:25.8	The book is titled Caput, The End of the German Miracle, and it's one book that I can
0:32.4	highly recommend to anyone with an interest, not just in the German economy, but in many of these structural
0:38.7	changes that nowadays shape economic performance of many mature industrial economies.
0:45.0	And I am delighted to be joined today by the author of this book, which is no one else
0:50.4	then, Wolfgang Munchau.
0:52.6	Wolfgang has been a journalist and writer for several decades.
0:56.4	Many of us will know him from his time as associated editor and columnist in the Financial Times,
1:02.2	but he has for some time now led his own economic intelligence company called Eurointelligence.
1:09.5	And he writes a column for the new statesman in the UK.
1:13.5	And in the past weeks, I have also watched him on the unheard media platform.
1:20.7	Wolfgang, welcome.
1:22.5	Frederick, thank you for the invitation.
1:24.7	I am very much looking forward to this conversation because I think it's not just a very
1:30.3	topical theme, but it's also, I think what you have is a really great book which I enjoyed
1:36.6	immensely reading.
1:38.2	And even if I pride myself, even if I'm not a German, I pipe myself following German economy
1:43.5	quite closely, I learned a lot from I'm myself following German economy quite closely.
1:45.5	I learned a lot from it, which is why I recommend it to a lot of people that I've talked to since the book came out.
1:53.5	And I should also commend you for the excellent timing of the book, because if I'm not mistaken, the day after you launched your book,
2:02.6	the German government actually collapsed when the Liberal Party decided to leave the current coalition after a few years.
	...

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