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I must echo what @functor wrote below.
We are officially in a "technical recession". I don't know what that means, but I guess it's not good.
From my perspective the crisis is proceeding pretty much exactly as predicted. I earn more than the median or average salary in Germany, I live in the supposedly cheap countryside, I gave up all expensive hobbies and so did my wife, and yet I struggle to feed a family of three. Absolutely everything is expensive. Wages are barely creeping up, while inflation eats all that and more.
I invite you to look at the graph in https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Arbeit/Verdienste/Realloehne-Nettoverdienste/_inhalt.html .
Look at how the good red line rarely goes over the bad black line. Then look at the vast gulf that opened between them in the last few years. That's wages versus prices.
Looking at energy prices, I can't find a neat graph in what little time my patience gives me, but those are going up, too. Meanwhile politics announced plans to fix energy prices for various industries - now is that just lobbyism at work, or is that actually a somehow necessary act? And if the latter, is that because there is no energy crisis and everything's fine and renewables are doing a good enough job?
If there is no crisis, then fine, I guess everything just continues to look like one from the ground but we Germans are known to be unjustified doomsayers. Damn my lying eyes.
Germany has had a problem with declining industrial competitiveness even before C-19 struck. The auto industry peaked and it doesn't appear that there's anything to take its place in the immediate turn. That may explain the problem
It is in fact possible to have high inflation and an energy crisis brewing at the same time. That's what happened in the 1970s across much of the developed world. Many people thought this would be the same but it clearly isn't.
I think the inflationary impulse is bad, yet it has also peaked. Germany's underlying problems with finding a new growth model after relying so much on the auto industry will remain, however.
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Don't you mean the good blue line? Isn’t the red line real wages, and the blue nominal wages?
Well, yeah, strictly speaking it's the kinda good light blue line, the really good red line, and the thoroughly bad black line.
Sure, but the red line is just the blue line adjusted for the black line, so there is no reason to look at anything other than the red line. Which shows that real wages have generally risen each year, but recently have dropped.
You may have a point.
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