Through the 1990s and 2000s, for those paying attention to shareholder rights and corporate governance in general, Germany's relative stagnation was held up, like a decapitated head, as an example of the tragic fate that befell economies that failed to develop deep and liquid equity markets.
You see, Germany, until relatively recently, didn't have big stock markets. Rather, it had big long-term shareholders. Its financial markets were dominated not by investors and hedge funds and mutual funds, but instead by creditors. And... horror of horrors... German law mandated the inclusion of worker representatives on the supervisory boards of its public companies (sometimes even union members!) and the establishment of works councils. This German variety of capitalism encouraged cooperation between workers, management and investors. It also fostered stable, sustainable long-term growth (subject, of course, to the same kinds of cronyism that afflicts any economic concentration of power).
Warriors of the free market, of course, abhorred such characteristics. Germany did, after all, loose out on making a ton of money on the bubbles.
But Germany did not, in fact, lose out on the crises that followed those bubbles.
Germany is leading the recovery, such as it is, for the entire Euro Zone:
