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German Confidence Falters

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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German consumer activity has begun to be undermined by gas prices. That is the conclusion of Germany’s premier economic survey firm GfK Group. The firm published its comments in the “Consumer Climate study for Germany for March 2012.” At the core of the conclusions about effects of current economic conditions on near term behavior, GfK reported this

Following a value of 6.0 points in March, the overall indicator is forecasting 5.9 points for April 2012. The upward trend of the consumer climate over the last six months has therefore ceased, for now at least.

Germans believe that their purchasing power has been undermined by energy costs. But, up until now Germany’s economy has continued to expand, and business confidence has remained relatively good based on recent data from the German Ifo business-climate index. That means that the only nations of any size in the EU with growing economies are Germany and France. The importance of the trend cannot be overstated since these are the two largest nations in the region based on GDP. Now, the growth of GDPs in Germany and France are threatened for the same reason as in the US. Oil and gas prices have started to become overwhelming.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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