Isabella Weber

speaker

207 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2024 last heard Sep 2024

Isabella Weber’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Odd Lots · Lots More With Isabella Weber on Draghi's EU Competitiveness Report · 13 Sep 2024 podcast

preventing that reform.

If we look at what the German government has been doing, then in 2023 they kind of declared wick victory too early on my mind over the energy crisis, which then also meant that they went back to implementing the debt break, which basically tied up their hands.

And then we got this constitutional ruling saying that they have to um stick with the deck debt break, that all these um accounting uh uh ways out that they had found were basically not constitutional.

Then in twenty twenty four they decided again to stick with the debt rule.

While Germany is at this point already like the worst performing major economy in the world, and really any um macroeconomist would agree, I think, in their right mind, that this is a moment to spend.

I wasn't a panel with

Jason Furman, Jason and I are not necessarily known to agree on big questions, but we both strongly agreed that this is a moment to increase fiscal spending, right?

So this is this is really a a a a German exception to have this extremely conservative fiscal stance in middle in the middle of this crisis.

Yeah, great question.

There was actually an exhibition at the German Historical Museum a little while ago where they were trying to understand why this idea of saving is so deeply rooted in our culture.

Why?

And I mean savings rates are very high, right?

I mean their narrative was basically going back to some ideas of Prussian virtue and then uh Nazi propaganda that very heavily relied on like kind of making it a German virtue to save because it was was necessary for the war economy.

And then after the war that like kind of

someone who saves is a good person idea was perpetuated.

And then I think there's this

kind of equation between personal spending and fiscal spending by the state and this narrative of the Swabian housewife, which is very prominently rooted in people's minds.

So if you do polls whether the debt break is a good thing, most people actually think it is a good thing because it's been preached to them for so long.

Where by the way I think this idea of the Swa Swabian housewife is the way how to run

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