[chimeracoder]

> Part of the German economic success story has been keeping housing cheap, so they can keep pay down, so they can export. As soon as housing prices rise, pay rises, and the story falls apart.

The only reason they're able to do this is because of years of fairly extreme mercantilistic policies combined with struggling economies in other parts of the EU (Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and to an extent Ireland).

It works out for Germany in the short- and medium-run, but it's bad for the EU as a whole.

It's also bad for Germany in the long run, because even if extreme mercantilism were sustainable in a free market in the long run (spoiler: it's not), excess surplus means, by definition, that the government is underinvesting in public infrastructure. It takes a while for the effects of that to become evident, but Germany is starting to see hints of it already, and if these policies continue, it'll become much more pronounced.