The economy of Germany has been seeing good times as Chic would put it and this morning has seen an indicator of this. From Destatis.
The debt owed by the overall public budget (Federation, Länder, municipalities/associations of municipalities and social security funds, including all extra budgets) to the non-public sector amounted to 1,965.5 billion euros at the end of the fourth quarter of 2017. ……..Based on provisional results, the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) also reports that this was a decrease in debt of 2.1%, or 41.3 billion euros, compared with the end of the fourth quarter of 2016.
We talk of Germany being a surplus economy and here is another sign of it as it applies to itself the medicine it has prescribed for others.
Net lending of general government amounted to 36.6 billion euros in 2017…….. When measured as a percentage of gross domestic product at current prices (3,263.4 billion euros), the surplus ratio of general government was +1.1%.
Of course all of this is much easier in a growing economy.
For the whole year of 2017, this was an increase of 2.2% (calendar-adjusted: +2.5%),
Thus the national debt to GDP ratio will have declined and I am sure more than a few of you will have noted that the total debt is a fair bit smaller than Italy’s for a larger economy. This parsimony has of course been helped by European Central Bank purchases of German Bunds which means that even five-year bonds have a negative yield ( -0.07%). Of course there is a chicken and egg situation here but 469 billion Euros of bond purchases in a growing economy lead to yields which would lead past computer models to blow up like HAL-9000 in the Film 2001 A Space Odyssey.
Trade
Whilst we are looking at surpluses there is this ongoing saga which continued last year.
Arithmetically, the balance of exports and imports had an effect of +0.8 percentage points on GDP growth compared with the previous year.
Ironically Germany did actually boost its imports ( 4.8%) but its export performance ( 5.6%) was even better. This meant that the same old song was being played.
According to provisional results of the Deutsche Bundesbank, the current account of the balance of payments showed a surplus of 257.1 billion euros in 2017.
If we allow for the inaccuracies in the data and the latest “trade wars” debate mostly raised by President Trump has highlighted the issues here with some countries thinking they are both in surplus/deficit with each other the German surplus is a constant. This poses quite a few questions as of course on one line of thinking it was a cause of the credit crunch.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Commission have for years urged Germany to lift domestic demand and imports in order to reduce global economic imbalances and fuel global growth, including within the euro zone.
As time has passed it is hard not to wonder about how much Germany could have helped its Euro area partners via this route. Of course a catch is that it would have to want what they produce which gets forgotten. Also I find a wry humour in organisations like the IMF and EC telling Germans to “spend,spend,spend” to coin a phrase and consume more and yet also warn regularly about climate change.
Labour Market
There is another sign of success if we note this.
The adjusted unemployment rate was 3.6% again in January 2018……….Compared with January 2017, the number of persons in employment increased by 1.4% (+631,000 people). Roughly 1.6 million people were unemployed in January 2018, 160,000 fewer than a year earlier.
So we see that the quantity numbers for the labour market are very good as the unemployment rate chases that of Japan. However if we move to the quality arena things look a little different. From Bloomberg.
The scramble for qualified workers has become an existential issue for companies across Germany, which are offering enticements ranging from overseas sojourns and ski outings to subsidized housing and sausage platters.
Let us park the issue of whether the sausages are delicious and consider the cause of this.
After years of robust growth, unemployment has dropped to a record low of 5.4 percent, and the country has 1.2 million unfilled jobs—nearly equivalent to the population of Munich. Manufacturing, construction, and health care are particularly stretched, and 1 in 4 businesses may have to hold back production as a result of the labor crunch, the European Union reports.
So our HAL-9000 would predict wage growth and of course if it was in a central bank it would be flashing “output gap negative” and predicting stellar wage growth. Meanwhile back in the real world.
The corporate largesse hasn’t dramatically boosted salaries, at least so far. Compensation in Germany rose 13 percent in the last five years as unions moderated wage demands to help their companies maintain an edge in the face of growing global competition.
There is another similarity here with Japan in that the financial media have been telling us that wages are about to soar or sometimes that agreements have been signed. So they must spend their lives being disappointed as whilst the German figures are better than Japan’s they are not what has been promised.
If we look into the detail of the report we see that in spite of strong circumstances companies these days seem to prefer one-off payments rather than wage rises. Have we changed that much in response to the credit crunch as in being less certain about the future or not believing what we are told in this case about economic strength? There is some logic behind that in an era of Fake News stretching to diesel engines and indeed hybrid performance if we consider areas especially relevant to Germany, Maybe wages measures should switch to earnings per hour.
the country’s biggest union this year accepted a lower increase in salaries in exchange for the right to work fewer hours.
But America already does that and it has not changed the picture but maybe still worth a go.
House Prices
I note that in February the Bundesbank picked out house prices and told us this.
According to current estimates, price
exaggerations in urban areas overall in 2017
amounted to between 15% and 30%. In
the big cities, where considerable overvaluations
had already been measured earlier,
the price deviations are likely to have increased
further to 35%.
Price “exaggerations” is a new one but presumably is being driven by this.
According to figures based on bulwiengesa AG
data residential property prices in urban
areas in Germany continued to increase
sharply by around 9%, and hence at a
somewhat faster pace than in the three
preceding years, when the increase averaged
7½%.
Indeed there may well be issues similar to the British buy to let problem.
As in 2016, the rate of inflation for rental
apartment buildings in the towns and cities
as well as in Germany as a whole was markedly
higher than for owner- occupied housing.
Comment
So we have good times in many respects as after all many would see rising house prices as that too. Of course I do not and let me now throw in the impact of easy monetary policy at a time of economic growth.
The average mortgage rate, which had already hit
an all- time low in the preceding year, settled
at 1.7%, which was slightly above its
2016 level.
Interestingly the cost of housing is soaring relative to wages however you try to play it.
The continuing sharp price rises for housing
in urban centres were accompanied by a
significant increase of 7¼% in rents in new
contracts, which are chiefl y the outcome of
rent adjustments in the case of repeat occupancies.
This poses a question for what would happen if later in 2018 we see an economic slowing as suggested by weaker monetary data and some lower commodity prices? We will have to see about that but much further ahead is the issue of Germany’s demographics which combine a low birth rate, rising life expectancy ( economics is clearly the dismal science here) and an aging population. This leaves the intriguing thought that travelling towards it just like in Japan leads to negative interest-rates, low wage growth and a trade surplus…….Yet the public finances are very different.
Cash is King
Something else that Germany shares with the UK. From the Bundesbank March report via Google Translate.
The value of accumulated net issuance of euro banknotes by the Bundesbank rose between the end of 2009 and the end of 2017 from € 348 billion to € 635 billion. Since 2010
On average, the Bundesbank gave an average of € 35.8 billion in euro banknotes a year.
This corresponds to an average annual growth rate of 7.8%.
Yet we keep being told that cash is so yesterday whereas we may still be in the adventures of Stevie V
Money talks, mmm, mmm, money talks
Dirty cash I want you, dirty cash I need you, oho
Money talks, money talks
Dirty cash I want you, dirty cash I need you, oho