You mean like Germany's biggest car maker solved the disel exhaust correctly? I don't your generalization stands up.

What I can agree with is that the Germans are sticklers for sticklers sense. And I could argue that breaking more rules and being more aggressive during the financial melt down has left us much better of in the US. Vice versus in the EU being slow and not compromising enough has only paid the shit dividend they've been reaping since the melt down. Much of that fault lies with the Germans being sticklers for sticklers sake.

Finally, it seams pretty short sighted when DB (Deuche Bank) is it self a ticking time bomb, one with additional exposure on Italy.

Nobody is denying that Italy needs structural reform; that's obvious. Germany's instance to be a stickler for sticklers sake is not helping anybody (themselves included).

Which is why I mentioned "but many here don't understand you cannot just change a country's culture by forcing them to strictly follow EU rules.".

The VW case is seen by many as an exception and usually every corruption case tends to be dealt exemplary, whereas in my home country (PT) corruption, specially the small one (owning favors) is still seen as profitable, because no big fish really gets prosecuted and it is the only way some things are actually done.

We know for such that such cases will drag in court and be archived after a few years of public discussion on the media.

Good luck trying to live in the southern or eastern Europe trying to do without small favors. It is possible and many people strive for it, but it isn't easy.

And for Germany and corruption, while there may not be as much corruption inside Germany, German companies are in the top when it involves other countries (Submarines in PT, don't remember what in Greece, etc). Heck, they were even tax deductible until recently: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/1995-08-06/germany-wh...

- Not asking for a receipt when going to a private doctor to save on VAT

- Going to an unofficial dealer instead of getting the car serviced on the official brand stores

- Getting an hospital appointment to a know doctor via networking instead of waiting months for a random doctor at the district hospital

- Not declaring 100% of the income to IRS

- Renting rooms to university students without contracts

- Double accounting on restaurants

- Spending up construction license approvals on the countryside

- Black job market for farm and construction workers

- Work positions that are already given, when displayed on the Government newspaper

- Jobs by being the "sun/daughter/cousin of" instead of proper hiring process

Yes, not everyone makes use of those tricks.

Not sure the aggression and rule breaking are what has helped in the US. Considering the US debt and wasted bailout money I'm not so sure the US really is better off.

Does that really mean we should let a massive bank (or multiple banks) go bankrupt? Given the global financial system is so interconnected, only a fool would think this would have no impact to the german economy. I don't mind rules, but every rule is meant to be broken if the situation warrants it.

Why did anyone bother with the rule in the first place then? Wasn't this exactly the kind of situation it was supposed to cover? It's not like an Italian financial crisis was off the radar when this rule got written.

> Does that really mean we should let a massive bank (or multiple banks) go bankrupt?

We've let pretty much everything else go bankrupt in the past eight years. Maybe we should try a it with a bank or two?

> Given the global financial system is so interconnected, only a fool...

That's exactly what the banks said last time to get their bailouts. I think only a fool would believe them again.

(edit: quotes/formatting)

2. Bankruptcy will lead to local deposit funds having to reimburse €100,000 per person, per bank. Which will ultimately be paid for by the taxpayer. It might actually be cheaper for the taxpayer to just save the bank.

At least in Belgium, the government actually got quite a good return on the emergency funds they lent to the banks during the financial crisis. So we're looking at a possible return vs a certain loss.

I'm not saying all banks need to be bailed out, but it's only prudent to keep the option on the table if required. The world would be a different place if post Lehman governments would have let banks collapse.

  It might actually be cheaper for the taxpayer to just
  save the bank.

Theory 1: The [banking system / market / bankers paid seven-figure salaries] actually had little to no understanding of what they were doing. Complicated derivative products and credit default swaps were mispriced because nobody really understands the maths and their risk models are all wrong.

This suggests, if we want to prevent the problem from recurring, the legislative intervention should be to either ban complex financial products or require much higher capital reserves for banks gambling on them.

Theory 2: The [banking system / market / bankers paid seven-figure salaries] had accurate models and understood the risks. They just decided they could go to the roulette table and put a trillion dollars on red, and the government would bail them out if the ball landed on black.

This suggests, if we want to prevent the problem from recurring, the legislative intervention should be to make bailouts radically less attractive for the people who benefit from such gambling. This could mean not providing bailouts, so banks that gamble and lose go bankrupt; or could involve some of the many other disincentives legislators have at their disposal.

If you follow this theory, and you adopt the policy that there will be no bailouts, you have to let the bank fail to prove to people that you really mean it.

How, exactly? And if that's the case, isn't it already the failure that we're letting DB hold the world hostage?

The world would be a different place if post Lehman governments would have let banks collapse

Why does the solution to this scary, foreboding fate always revolve around making sure the bankers stay fabulously wealthy?

For 90% of the world (ahaha), winter has already been here since 2008. It's about time the banks were exposed to the weather, I'd say.

You clients start doing more and more of their business with an Italian bank that has poor capital reserves and a shoddy loan book and is losing money, but offers better terms to customers. The bank looks like it's going to fail, so the Italian government props it up with cheap credit and buys it's bad loans at above market rates so that it can stay in business - and keep winning business off you because it's still offering better terms to customers. Plus now those customers know the bank won't go bust and they can rely on it because the Italian government will support it no matter what.

The customer's business is being indirectly subsidised by the Italian government through below-market banking fees. Why should they ever do business with you again?

Like Deutsche Bank? They were chock-full of bad derivatives, Greek bonds, and whatnot.

Most of Italy's big banks are fine. They went just fine through the subprime crisis and the Greek bond crisis, and the government never had to save them.

It's the smaller banks that have problems.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2012-05-23/merkel-sho...

Given that the indications so far is that the Brexit vote has made attitudes towards the EU far more positive so far, it'd need to be amazingly successful for the UK for anyone else to leave at this point, and I don't anyone here that don't expect it to be a massively painful experience, even if they voted to leave.