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Comment by ailideex | Hacker News Reader

> the common market has distorted things in Germany's favor, an effect that probably won't last.

Quite by design. Having the whole Europe on Germany's monetary policy (i.e. Eurozone with EUR interest rates) while not sharing any other policy is heavily in Germany's favour and one of the main reasons the European debt crisis happened.

Not to say that being a well governed country with good policy and a culture that is conducive to high productivity and good quality did not help - it definitely did. And I'm not trying to redirect blame for the Eurozone crisis - Greece has mainly itself to blame.

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That's a very simplistic view and doesn't at all cover the whole picture. The union benefits all countries in varying ways (eg without the union Italian and Spanish and French banks would long have gone bankrupt). At the same time it also has negative effects. But you have the same issue internally inside any larger country.

> * without the union Italian and Spanish and French banks would long have gone bankrupt*

If you think sick institutions should die, that's not a benefit.

Sick banks mostly died anyway, but without outside help even healthy banks would go down in that environment.

Institutions don’t die only because they are sick, sometimes certain things need to have certain scale or environment to function.

The silicon valley tech giants wouldn’t have enjoyed the same success if the US was not what it is.

> eg without the union Italian and Spanish and French banks would long have gone bankrupt

Not french banks. At least from IMF representatives pov.

Source: https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2009/wp09201.pdf

Excerpt: "French banks were not immune but proved relatively resilient to the global financial crisis reflecting their business and supervision features".

And not Spanish banks. It was some spanish "cajas", not banks. Can seem similar, but falls in a different category.

A quick Google suggests 'cajas' is closer to a credit union, though I'd love to hear more about the difference between a 'cajas' and a bank and the cultural expectations for both. (I would have been surprised if that happened to a US credit union.)

> I'd love to hear more about the difference between a 'cajas' and a bank

I think that Credit Union would made a good definition of a caja de ahorros [1], More or less equivalent. We could say that some spanish credit unions poorly managed by politicians were rescued with the money from all spaniard's taxes, but not the banks (and not all credit unions).

[1] 'a Cajas' does not exist. The singular is 'Caja'

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