Laughing into my latte

Remember, gentle reader, when I told you that I see this economic crisis as being a boon for smaller countries who — as I put it — “were considered too immature a market to be let in on the “big boy” deals“? Because those “less developed” economies didn’t couple so closely with the United States’ shadow banking system, I postulated that they would be/were exempt from most of the resultant disembowelling?

Well, it’s nice to be vindicated, and even nicer when the story involves two Western countries. Behold, I bring you Der Spiegel :

The former East Germany has long been eclipsed economically by the richer and more industrialized West. Yet ironically the eastern part of the country is now actually better equipped to deal with the ongoing economic crisis.

The “ironically” is just another way for the West Germans to still put the superior boot into East Germany while they roll around in the dirt, pretending they’re not choking on it.

[West Germany snapshot: largest contraction in 39 years; predictions of negative growth (why not just say 'decline'? Oh well, them's the vocabulary) of up to 4% this year; Philipp Holzmann construction (a little nudge was all that was needed), Kirch (media) Group, Opel car-makers, Arcandor retail group, BenQ Mobile, Berlin (yes, the city!), etc., all declaring bankruptcy. Now that's an economic eclipse you can believe in.]

If I’m sick of the constant moral superiority that’s been shown by West Germany to East Germany all these long, lonely years, I can only imagine what it feels like to be East German! One (West) Berliner even had the gall to tell me that litter, petty crime, racist attacks on migrants, and property damage never ever occurred in Germany before Reunification!! In all our conversations, all the ills of Germany were laid at the feet of the East Germans. Our friendship ended soon after I pointed out to her that that, in fact, was often not the case. (Yep, how to win friends and influence people, that’s me.)

Anyway, back to Der Spiegel. According to the paper’s reading of the government report, the East is doing so much better because:

1. They have more small- and medium-sized companies which are “thought to be able to react more flexibly to the challenges posed by the economic downturn.”

2. They are “far less dependent on exports”.

While this may be part of the story, the entire mood of the piece is — as Colonel Sherman T Potter used to put it — horse hockey. No mention at all is made of the tremor event that precipitated the tsunami, which was the massive, unregulated leveraging of securities in a highly secretive, highly coupled worldwide banking environment that was run like a congregation of male toddlers who’d just discovered their penises.

There is a caveat to East Germany’s mirth, however:

[T]he government expects the former East to have caught up with the weaker western regions, such as Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia, within the next 10 years.

Wolfgang Tiefensee, the government minister with responsibility for the “new federal states,” as the former East Germany is officially known, told the Berliner Zeitung that this would be a “considerable success.”

Ooooo, if I was East Germany, considering how the last eighteen months have panned out, I don’t think I’d be too happy about Wolfy’s words. Under current circumstances, it appears there’s only so much “success” West Germany can take.