Since the financial crisis is clearly a global problem, the risk-bearing capacity of many internationally active financial institutions has now been affected severely on a worldwide scale. Turning to developments in the real sector, it is striking that Germany saw a particularly sharp drop in overall economic activity relative to the rest of the world.
Germany’s GDP fell by 3.8% in the first quarter of this year, and the Bundesbank predicts a fall of 6.2% for the year 2009 as a whole, making Germany one of the industrial countries currently being affected particularly seriously by the crisis. The reasons are not hard to find. Germany has an extremely open economy and is accordingly heavily dependent on exports.