It was a successful time for capital investors, in which, on average, many European asset classes were able to achieve a performance that was higher than the nominal growth rates or the inflation rates – with the exception of the money market. More on the value of the money later.
Like no other chancellorship before her, the Merkels were confronted with economic crises of epoch-making proportions, most of which arose outside of Europe and Germany, but which also brought the local economies and capital markets into existentially threatening situations. One could also say: three crises of the century as a continuous challenge to a chancellorship. The Lehman crisis initially led us into the greatest recession after the Second World War. Only the economic downturn triggered by the global corona pandemic even exceeded this. The third crisis, smaller in the global context, was existential for Europe and the euro zone: the European debt crisis. Mario Draghi is certainly rightly called the savior of the euro in the first place, but he got the political and fiscal flank protection from the large countries of the euro zone, above all from Angela Merkel and her finance minister at the time, Wolfgang Schäuble.
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