Maine news, sports, weather from Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram, Portland, Maine

July 28, 2012

Germans give credit to paying cash

A national distrust of debt and credit also plays out in attitudes about Europe's fiscal crisis.

The Associated Press

BERLIN - 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 $2,080 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-mark note to replace its popular 1,000-mark bill when it joined the common currency.

It's one of the largest denomination notes being produced anywhere today, worth around $600, and is even known in neighboring France as "the German note." While even discount supermarkets in Germany happily take the 500, very few shops in France will accept the bill.

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 percent. That compares to some 80 percent in troubled EU nations like Greece, Italy and Spain, and around 70 percent in Britain and the U.S., 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 percent 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 percent in the 27-nation European Union between 1998 and 2010 -- and more than 35 percent in Britain and 60 percent in Ireland -- Germany was the only EU nation to see it fall, with a drop of 5.4 percent 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 percent of Germans over the age of 15 even possess a card, compared with 62 percent in the U.S., 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 percent of Germans think the chancellor should stick to her guns, while only 32 percent think she should reconsider her insistence on austerity.

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 like Germany and their crisis-hit neighbors.

(Continued on page 2)

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