Bertrand Benoit, the Finan­cial Times’ Berlin bureau chief, dis­cusses why the US, French and British don’t under­stand Germany’s “refusal to tackle the reces­sion head-on”.

What is hap­pen­ing is a clas­sic clash of cul­tures, and any­one puz­zling to grasp Germany’s anaemic reac­tion to the finan­cial cri­sis and its eco­nomic fall­out could do worse than take a stroll through its inhab­i­tants’ men­tal land­scape. Much of the eco­nomic think­ing tak­ing place in Ger­man polit­i­cal cir­cles is guided by what Otto Friedrich Boll­now, a mathematician-cum-philosopher, once described as “eco­nomic virtues” – fru­gal­ity, dili­gence, indus­try and so on. One wide­spread notion is that one should not bor­row with­out being in a posi­tion to pay back.

I feel this sen­tence, found in the intro­duc­tory sec­tion of the arti­cle, is the most penetrating:

The notion that fam­i­lies should finance every­day pur­chases on credit, the [Ger­man radio pre­sen­ter] com­mented, “sug­gests Wash­ing­ton has still to under­stand what brought us there in the first place”.