Against this backdrop and not surprisingly, Germany is no longer seen as “the sick man of Europe” as was the case at the beginning of this decade. The UK, too, was once stuck with this rather unpleasant label, even though that was roughly 30 years ago.
During the past ten years, however, the UK has been experiencing sustained economic growth while inflation has remained largely under control. Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, has frequently referred to this development as the “nice decade”, a pun in which “nice” stands for “non-inflationary consistently expansionary”.