The cognoscenti of international economics are once again agape, and not in a flattering way, at the budget surpluses Germany’s government keeps running, when instead it should be stimulating the economy with tax cuts and higher spending, Bloomberg News reported in a commentary. The surplus revealed this week for 2019, at 13.5 billion euros ($15 billion), is the fifth in a row, and the biggest ever. Many Germans still regard such numbers as signs of economic virtue and virility, as they keep slashing public debt and reveling in high employment numbers.

German cadmium telluride solar panel producer Calyxo TS Solar GmbH filed for insolvency in December for the second time in less than two years in the district court in Aachen, Germany, pv magazine reported. The court has appointed Christoph Niering from the law firm Niering Stock Tömp to serve as the provisional insolvency administrator. Talks on the possible arrival of new strategic partners are still ongoing, so management has been forced to open new proceedings. Niering said on Friday that it is still possible to maintain operations and process existing orders.

More than 400,000 jobs could be lost in Germany over the next decade as its auto industry shifts towards electric vehicles, according to a government-sanctioned report that underlines the wrenching change facing Europe’s largest economy, the Financial Times reported. In a worst-case scenario, Germany’s workforce could shrink by almost 1 per cent by 2030 if carmakers such as Volkswagen and Daimler are forced to rely on imports to meet targets for electric vehicle sales. The vast majority of vehicle batteries — the most valuable component of electric cars — are manufactured in Asia.

Jörg Jahnke Dachbau, a Berlin roofing company, is facing a new year’s slump with few parallels in its history, the Financial Times reported. “It’s an absolute disaster,” said its managing director, Joachim Meder. “I’ve lost €4.5m in orders. It’s as if someone’s just turned out the lights.” The culprit is the Berlin city government’s plan to freeze rents for five years — a move critics describe as one of the most far-reaching interventions in the capital’s housing market since German reunification.

A sharp drop in German exports in November has added to the impression that Europe’s largest economy had a shaky end to last year, when it is widely expected to have suffered its worst performance for six years, the Financial Times reported. Data published on Thursday gave a mixed picture for the German economy. There was a much larger monthly fall in exports than expected of 2.3 per cent in November, while industrial production rebounded slightly faster than economists had forecast.

The two-year recession in Germany’s industrial heartlands is deepening, according to new data showing that orders in the country’s core manufacturing sector fell by more than expected in November — defying expectations of a rebound, the Financial Times reported. New German manufacturing orders fell by 1.3 per cent in November compared with the previous month, according to provisional figures published by the Federal Statistics Office on Wednesday. Economists polled by Reuters had expected an increase of 0.2 per cent.

German cabin-crew union UFO called for more strikes at Deutsche Lufthansa AG’s low-cost Germanwings unit after the two sides failed to settle a long-running dispute, the Irish Times reported. Workers at Germanwings, which now operates under the Eurowings umbrella, will strike between December 30th and January 1st, the union said. Further strike action will be announced after January 2nd, 2020. The Germanwings brand was folded into Lufthansa’s Eurowings group after a deadly 2015 crash. Passengers are only able to book through the Eurowings brand.

Deutsche Telekom has reached an agreement with its works council on restructuring its troubled T-Systems IT services division, a company spokesman said on Friday, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. The spokesman confirmed an earlier report in Handelsblatt that said the agreement included moving large parts of the business to a newly created German subsidiary and affected more than 2,000 staff.

A few weeks ago, Germany’s ruling Christian Democratic party put out a tweet that, depending on your viewpoint, was either naively sincere or shamelessly provocative. Above what looked like a pair of bondage items, the CDU said: “We have a small fetish: solid finances without new debts.” Fiscal rectitude, the tweet went on to say, represents justice between older and younger generations and is a precondition of investments in society’s future, the Financial Times reported in a commentary.

Germany’s stagnant economy is dragging down the eurozone, economists have warned, as new data showed Europe’s largest economy is on track for another sluggish year. Figures form IHS Markit showed the country’s purchasing managers’ index (PMI) fell to 43.4 in December from 44.1 the previous month, the first downward movement in three months. The result was worse than the 44.5 reading predicted by economists in a survey by Reuters. And the eurozone also saw a drop in the PMI, an index of prevailing direction of economic trends in manufacturing and services.