Poor Germany

Well, here’s an eyebrow raiser: Germans Among Poorest in Europe: ECB Study.

The paper is available here: The Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey. The cross country comparison of net wealth can be found in Table 4.1 on page 76.

Median net wealth in Germany for 2010 was 51K eur. Compare this to median wealth in Greece (101K), Italy (173K) and Spain (182K).

This just doesn’t sound right to me, but I haven’t gone through the report in detail. Evidently, the differences are driven primarily by real estate wealth. Thankfully, Germany escaped the housing price bubble that afflicting many European countries; see figure below.

(click to enlarge)

Moreover, as I noted here, the German growth experience over the past 20 years has been nothing to write home about.

Germany: low growth, no asset price bubbles, low wealth, but…stable. Das ist gut?

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