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“Germany cannot afford it”: Nobel laureate warns against Lindner as finance minister
“For its own sake, Lindner should be spared the impossible task,” write the Briton Adam Tooze and the US Nobel laureate in economics, Joseph Stiglitz, in a guest article.
© Uwe Koch / Eibner-Pressefoto / Picture Alliance
Lindner wants to become finance minister. Two economists are appalled by this. The liberals should rather take over a “super ministry for digital technology,” the experts advise.
Two prominent economists have warned that FDP leader Christian Lindner will become finance minister in a future federal government. “For his own sake, Lindner should be spared the impossible task of having to apply his antediluvian budgetary agenda to today’s financial situation,” write Brit Adam Tooze and US Nobel Prize in Economics, Joseph Stiglitz from Columbia University in New York Guest article for the weekly newspaper “Die Zeit”. “Neither Germany nor Europe can afford this type of crash test.”
The FDP’s financial policy agenda, for which Lindner stands, is not just “an accumulation of conservative clichés,” write the professors. “Much more important is that these are clichés from a bygone era, namely those of the 1990s. We no longer live in the world that produced them.”
State austerity vs. debt
The background to this is a dispute over the direction of economic and financial policy, which flared up during the euro crisis in 2011. Many international experts consider the budget discipline advocated by German governments in recent years, which has also been demanded by other countries and there – for example in Greece – was accompanied by drastic austerity measures, to be wrong and outdated.
Instead, in times of high public investment needs, new debts are justifiable and even necessary. Although the FDP has not been part of the government since 2013, it is a particular advocate of a balanced budget.
Lindner had expressed interest in the post of finance minister during the election campaign. Tooze and Stiglitz are now recommending that the Liberals should rather take over a “super ministry for digital technology” in a new government with the SPD and the Greens. The Ministry of Finance, however, should occupy the Greens.