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Germans hard-wired for thrift and savings
5:30 AM Wednesday Aug 1, 2012
Of the nearly 50 Ikea stores in Germany, two near the French border have started letting customers pay by credit card. Photo / AP
Head to the checkout at an Ikea in Stockholm to pay for your new leather corner sofa and with the swipe of a Visa card it's yours.
Don't try that in Berlin: that'll be €1699 ($2574) up front, please.
It's that financial culture, a deep-seated aversion to debt and an emphasis on responsibility that makes Chancellor Angela Merkel's hardline approach to solving the European financial crisis so popular in Germany.
The attitude shows up in all walks of life, from the daily trip to the grocery store to putting a roof over your head.
The economy is so reliant on cash for transactions small and big, a way to ensure you don't spend more than you have, that Germany pushed hard for the €500 note to replace its popular 1000 mark bill when it joined the common currency.
It's one of the largest denomination notes being produced anywhere today, worth around US$600 ($740), and is even known in France as "the German note".
While even discount supermarkets in Germany happily take the €500, very few shops in France will accept it.
Even though Germany is Europe's largest economy and one of its richest per head, it is last in home ownership with just over 40 per cent.
That compares to 80 per cent in troubled EU nations like Greece, Italy and Spain, and around 70 per cent in Britain and the US, where owning your own home is part of the "American Dream".
Germans tend to be instinctively averse to taking out a mortgage.
And lenders often demand a 20 per cent down payment on a house or substantial collateral.
So a culture has sprung up of just renting and holding on to cash.
When mortgage debt shot up by more than 20 per cent in the 27-nation European Union between 1998 and 2010 and more than 35 per cent in Britain and 60 per cent in Ireland, Germany was the only EU nation to see it fall, with a drop of 5.4 per cent in that time period, according to the European Mortgage Federation.
The German aversion to debt also translates to credit card use or non-use.
Only 36 per cent of Germans over the age of 15 even possess a card, compared with 62 per cent in the United States, according to World Bank figures.
And even when Germans do have a card, the limit is usually tied to a customer's bank balance and the bill is automatically paid off in full from the customer's account within a month or so.
"If I pay with my Visa, then Visa takes it from my account. I don't get any real benefits," said Rainer Hoedt, a Berlin high school teacher.
"When we use our credit cards it's basically only when we go to the States and do our travel expenses through it because it's so easy. Here in Germany I don't use it at all."
Around the world Merkel has been derided as intransigent in her approach to the financial crisis, demanding budget cuts and fiscal austerity from allegedly profligate EU members.
But her hardline stand plays well among the people who elected her.
A new poll for Stern magazine shows 64 per cent of Germans think the chancellor should stick to her guns, while only 32 per cent think she should reconsider her insistence on austerity.
The Forsa agency questioned 1003 adults on July 5 and 6 for the poll, which had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
That means measures which some politicians and economists believe offer a way out of the debt crisis are considered unacceptable here.
Take Eurobonds, for example.
Such joint debt could help ease the crisis by pooling risk between rich eurozone countries such as Germany and their crisis-hit neighbours.
No way, say Germans. Eurobonds, they argue, would just encourage profligate countries to blow their budgets even further, not to mention raise German borrowing costs.
Bailouts? Fine, but only if countries agree to strict austerity measures to get their financial houses in order.
Print money? Not a chance, Germans say, still haunted by the memory of the hyperinflation of the early 20th century that helped create the conditions for Hitler's rise.
Germany's attitude to credit and debt largely stem from the financial trauma of the years that preceded the Nazi era.
In the wake of huge reparation payments after the loss of World War I, the German mark went from its wartime level of about 4 to 5 per dollar to several trillion to the dollar.
Germany only agreed to eventually give up the mark in favour of the euro because the European Central Bank was designed just like the Bundesbank, Germany's central bank, as an anti-inflation watchdog whose mandate does not include political considerations such as stimulating job growth like the US Federal Reserve.
The experience of hyperinflation is one that has been passed from generation to generation, said DZ Bank research economist Michael Stappel.
"My grandmother always talked about how every-day prices were going up, how a bread roll that cost 10 pfennigs then cost 5 million marks, and that could never be permitted to happen again," he said.
"And my grandmother never spent, she always saved, maybe 80 per cent she saved."
Germans today don't save quite that much - 11 per cent on average - but that's still much higher than less than 6 per cent in the US or 6.5 per cent in Japan, for example.
And even the approach to saving is conservative, with 40 per cent going into bank accounts, 30 per cent into life insurance and only 6 per cent into stocks, Stappel said.
Another 3 per cent goes into bonds.
So when Merkel holds Greeks and Spaniards to strict standards in return for European Union bailout funds to which Germany is the largest contributor and regularly shoots down ideas on quick fixes to the euro crisis, it should come as no surprise, Stappel said.
"It's a part of the German culture."
Attitudes toward debt are starting to change, albeit slowly.
Credit cards, for example, are often needed for online purchases and are starting to become accepted in more places, albeit often only with a roll of the eyes.
And Ikea is taking them now in two of their nearly 50 German stores, spokeswoman Josefin Thorell said.
But both the stores that do take plastic are near the border with France where there's more demand from customers that they accept credit cards, said Thorell.
"It's to make it easier for the French customers."
- AP
Copyright ©2012, APN Holdings NZ Limited
5:30 AM Wednesday Aug 1, 2012
Of the nearly 50 Ikea stores in Germany, two near the French border have started letting customers pay by credit card. Photo / AP
Head to the checkout at an Ikea in Stockholm to pay for your new leather corner sofa and with the swipe of a Visa card it's yours.
Don't try that in Berlin: that'll be €1699 ($2574) up front, please.
It's that financial culture, a deep-seated aversion to debt and an emphasis on responsibility that makes Chancellor Angela Merkel's hardline approach to solving the European financial crisis so popular in Germany.
The attitude shows up in all walks of life, from the daily trip to the grocery store to putting a roof over your head.
The economy is so reliant on cash for transactions small and big, a way to ensure you don't spend more than you have, that Germany pushed hard for the €500 note to replace its popular 1000 mark bill when it joined the common currency.
It's one of the largest denomination notes being produced anywhere today, worth around US$600 ($740), and is even known in France as "the German note".
While even discount supermarkets in Germany happily take the €500, very few shops in France will accept it.
Even though Germany is Europe's largest economy and one of its richest per head, it is last in home ownership with just over 40 per cent.
That compares to 80 per cent in troubled EU nations like Greece, Italy and Spain, and around 70 per cent in Britain and the US, where owning your own home is part of the "American Dream".
Germans tend to be instinctively averse to taking out a mortgage.
And lenders often demand a 20 per cent down payment on a house or substantial collateral.
So a culture has sprung up of just renting and holding on to cash.
When mortgage debt shot up by more than 20 per cent in the 27-nation European Union between 1998 and 2010 and more than 35 per cent in Britain and 60 per cent in Ireland, Germany was the only EU nation to see it fall, with a drop of 5.4 per cent in that time period, according to the European Mortgage Federation.
The German aversion to debt also translates to credit card use or non-use.
Only 36 per cent of Germans over the age of 15 even possess a card, compared with 62 per cent in the United States, according to World Bank figures.
And even when Germans do have a card, the limit is usually tied to a customer's bank balance and the bill is automatically paid off in full from the customer's account within a month or so.
"If I pay with my Visa, then Visa takes it from my account. I don't get any real benefits," said Rainer Hoedt, a Berlin high school teacher.
"When we use our credit cards it's basically only when we go to the States and do our travel expenses through it because it's so easy. Here in Germany I don't use it at all."
Around the world Merkel has been derided as intransigent in her approach to the financial crisis, demanding budget cuts and fiscal austerity from allegedly profligate EU members.
But her hardline stand plays well among the people who elected her.
A new poll for Stern magazine shows 64 per cent of Germans think the chancellor should stick to her guns, while only 32 per cent think she should reconsider her insistence on austerity.
The Forsa agency questioned 1003 adults on July 5 and 6 for the poll, which had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
That means measures which some politicians and economists believe offer a way out of the debt crisis are considered unacceptable here.
Take Eurobonds, for example.
Such joint debt could help ease the crisis by pooling risk between rich eurozone countries such as Germany and their crisis-hit neighbours.
No way, say Germans. Eurobonds, they argue, would just encourage profligate countries to blow their budgets even further, not to mention raise German borrowing costs.
Bailouts? Fine, but only if countries agree to strict austerity measures to get their financial houses in order.
Print money? Not a chance, Germans say, still haunted by the memory of the hyperinflation of the early 20th century that helped create the conditions for Hitler's rise.
Germany's attitude to credit and debt largely stem from the financial trauma of the years that preceded the Nazi era.
In the wake of huge reparation payments after the loss of World War I, the German mark went from its wartime level of about 4 to 5 per dollar to several trillion to the dollar.
Germany only agreed to eventually give up the mark in favour of the euro because the European Central Bank was designed just like the Bundesbank, Germany's central bank, as an anti-inflation watchdog whose mandate does not include political considerations such as stimulating job growth like the US Federal Reserve.
The experience of hyperinflation is one that has been passed from generation to generation, said DZ Bank research economist Michael Stappel.
"My grandmother always talked about how every-day prices were going up, how a bread roll that cost 10 pfennigs then cost 5 million marks, and that could never be permitted to happen again," he said.
"And my grandmother never spent, she always saved, maybe 80 per cent she saved."
Germans today don't save quite that much - 11 per cent on average - but that's still much higher than less than 6 per cent in the US or 6.5 per cent in Japan, for example.
And even the approach to saving is conservative, with 40 per cent going into bank accounts, 30 per cent into life insurance and only 6 per cent into stocks, Stappel said.
Another 3 per cent goes into bonds.
So when Merkel holds Greeks and Spaniards to strict standards in return for European Union bailout funds to which Germany is the largest contributor and regularly shoots down ideas on quick fixes to the euro crisis, it should come as no surprise, Stappel said.
"It's a part of the German culture."
Attitudes toward debt are starting to change, albeit slowly.
Credit cards, for example, are often needed for online purchases and are starting to become accepted in more places, albeit often only with a roll of the eyes.
And Ikea is taking them now in two of their nearly 50 German stores, spokeswoman Josefin Thorell said.
But both the stores that do take plastic are near the border with France where there's more demand from customers that they accept credit cards, said Thorell.
"It's to make it easier for the French customers."
- AP
Copyright ©2012, APN Holdings NZ Limited
