So Germany confirms its position this morning as Europe’s top economic machine. (Not that any sensible individual doubted this for one moment even during the maelstrom of the last 3 years.) . In the second quarter its GDP zoomed ahead by a remarkable 2.2%  There hasn’t been a faster rate of growth than this since reunification back in 1990.  Punters worldwide are back in the market for BMWs – which had some cracking sales figures out this week -  and Germany’s other high value manufactured goods. And they’ve got a half way decent football team for the first time in years.

But there is far less good news from what those Euro economists term the ‘peripheral’ nations.  Even less charitable individuals insist on referring to them as the PIIGS (Portugal Ireland Italy Greece Spain). Growth in the sty is pitiful.

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The Government needs to be careful that it doesn’t go overboard with this guilt trip.

We’ve got the glums in the UK. A poll by Ipsos Mori has shown that consumers in the UK are among the most pessimistic in the world when it comes to their country’s economic situation. The UK economy was thought to be in “a very bad state” by 34% of domestic consumers. Only the Spanish (63%) and the Japanese (41%)  were more down in the mouth than this.

In the developing world, by contrast, life appears to be a bowl of cherries as everyone heads for the sunny uplands. In India, an extraordinary 85% of consumers see their country’s economic situation as good. In China that figure is 77%, and in Brazil 65%.

Indians are amazing. In a country where 40% of the population live below the international poverty line – that’s 456 million individuals making do on less than $1.25 per day – nearly nine in ten of them still think everything’s great. That is a classic developing world phenomenon: when you’re down, and have been down for time immemorial, the only way is up.

Traditionally in the UK, we’ve been quite a sceptical nation. Steady and phlegmatic. We’re not quite as dour as the Finns but we don’t do wide-eyed, optimistic whooping, thigh-slapping and ‘way to GO!!’ stuff. (Neither do the Americans, any more. They are, according to the survey, only marginally less miserable about things than us at the moment: 13% of Brits see our economic situation as “good”, but only 18% of Americans feel that way.)   

Part of our problem at the moment is that the Government is going out of its way to make us feel bad, not good. We have all been very naughty indeed, Brits have been told, ad nauseam. So we have to stand in the austerity corner, without sweets or the full range of social security benefits, until we see the error of our ways.

I think Cameron and Osborne need to be careful as their Government advances into its next phase. Because if they continue to lay the ‘feel-bad’ edict on with a trowel, then consumer confidence – already pretty badly dented – will fall even further. That won’t benefit anyone. Vince Cable may have many virtues, but helping a nation feel good about itself isn’t among them.

Our economic plight is not as bad as the Spanish or the Greeks. If I was a Greek, I’d feel there was quite a lot to be miserable about at the moment – with next to no light at the end of the tunnel. I just hope that our low score on this survey is just a reflection of our slightly more cautious outlook generally, rather than the possibility that we’re all collapsing into an apathetic depression. 

I’m all for wealthy individuals giving their money away. But the issue isn’t straightforward.
 
John D. Rockefeller said: ‘It is a poor man who dies rich’. Well, by this measure Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are going to die poor. Or rich. Or whatever. The news that Gates has organised a get-together of a few dozen of his billionaire friends and persuaded them to hand over half their wealth to worthy charitable causes has created a minor sensation.
 
Buffett himself has promised to give away 99% of his wealth. ‘We called 70 to 80 people in the Forbes list,’ said Buffett. ‘It was a very soft sell but 40 signed up’. Those who have failed to sign up will find the old boy from Omaha on their tails as he continues to pursue them to do the right thing with their lucre. ‘Every saint has a past, every sinner has a future, so we’ll keep working,’ commented Warren over his cheeseburger and cherry Coke.
 
The whole extraordinary phenomenon of celeb-philanthropy has really taken off in the US. The super-rich compete against each other to give the most – it’s philanthropic willy-waving of the highest order. The latest offers are expected to inject at least $60 billion (£40 billion) into charities, and you can bet there will be more to come as they fight for a generosity mention in Vanity Fair.
 
I don’t for one minute want to dissuade wealthy individuals, from the UK or the US, from giving away money and these people should be applauded for their generosity. But the issue isn’t entirely straightforward.
 
Firstly, proportion is all. A billion-dollar giveaway gets loads of headlines, and it will go a lot further than ten in the effort to discover a cure for malaria. But it’s the thought and the sacrifice that count. One should be no less impressed by the generosity of normal (and even quite poor) folk who give away chunks of their cash that they could quite easily spend on food or the necessaries for themselves. What, in god’s name, is Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, supposed to do with the half of his $13.5 billion fortune that he hasn’t donated to charity anyway? Such sums are superfluous to any requirement he’ll ever have. How many yachts, football teams, Faberge eggs or Frank Lampard signed gold Iphones can a guy have in a lifetime? 
 
Secondly, very rich people rarely give away vast sums without influence or control over where it goes. They don’t just sprinkle it out of the window of the Gulfstream willy-nilly. This has a good side: the rich tend to be good with cash and making it work for its living, and many charities are poor at spending money. Nobody would argue with Bill Gates’ crusade to eliminate malaria. That is a good thing. How can it be anything but a good thing? But choosing malaria rather than, for example, helping kids with learning disabilities in Kansas is a political act. These are the tough choices to do with resource allocation – and they are especially tough at the moment – that governments make. And governments are elected by us. Bill and Warren aren’t.
 
But these are quibbles. Much of the money given will do good things and those who benefit from it will be grateful. Would that we were better at it in the UK, where giving to support charity or the arts is poor compared to the US. It’s actually been quite a bad ‘sleb’ giving couple of days. We’ve watched the wretched appearance of mega-rich Naomi Campbell at the war crimes trial in the Hague: she claims she gave Taylor’s diamonds to a flunky who was then to give them to charity, and what happened to the dirty stones thereafter is anyone’s guess. It makes you wonder what sort of a world people like Naomi live in. You would have thought that her advisors – legal and PR – might have recommended a touch of respect for a UN War crimes trial, even a smidgen of humility. Let’s hope she finds them fast and hands them over to Warren so he can hand (99% of) them back to the poor of Liberia.  

Despite my Welsh roots, I can’t see much for the Principality to be optimistic about at the moment.
 
The more observant among you will have noticed that my surname is not very English. It’s very Welsh. When they found themselves on their uppers in Pembroke Dock during the 1860s, my ancestors got on the Son of Glendower’s equivalent of a coffin ship and didn’t get off until it reached Chile. However, something went wrong out there – maybe they didn’t take to the Merlots of the Maipo valley – and the Gwyther parents appear to have perished, leaving the kids to return to the UK and settle with a maiden aunt in the East End of London.
 
So I take a distant interest in what goes on West of Bristol and Chester. And it’s not often that news from the Principality fills one with hope or joy. Economically, Wales is not in good shape. It’s hugely reliant on the public sector, and its private sector businesses are too small in number and in size (Wales’ largest quoted company is Admiral insurance with 3,000 staff). The Welsh don’t make as much noise as the Scots or the Northern Irish when complaining about the relationship with Westminster, and as a result, fewer taxpayer pounds have been flung at them. They blew what soft money they got from the EU and HMG trying to attract large manufacturers into Wales with grant aid; these perfidious people then promptly dropped the Welsh in favour of cheaper workforces in Asia or Eastern Europe.
 
The think-tank Oxford Economics estimated that in 2006-07 – before the crash – tax revenues of £19.3bn were raised in Wales, compared to Government expenditure of £28.2bn – a fiscal gap of £9.1bn. Public expenditure per head in Wales is higher than most of the English regions (although lower than in Scotland or Northern Ireland). Up to date GDP per capita figures make pretty grim reading, as well. The UK is led by Greater London on £35,000, while at the bottom of the scale come perennial underachievers Scotland on £20,000 and Northern Ireland on £16,000. But the wooden spoon goes to Wales, with £15,200. Oxford Economics predicts that Wales will take longer than any other UK region to get back to employment levels pre-crash: it will be later than 2025.
 
The issue of the Welsh language is a vexed one. Its supporters protest it’s good for the Welsh economy – it certainly created jobs for public sector pen-pushers when the going was good. But now times are tougher, worrying about getting everything translated into an ‘Insular Celtic’ language only spoken by 22% of the population looks like fiddling while Carnarvon Castle burns. It was a fair bet that George Osborne was going to set about slashing wasteful things Welsh faster than you could say Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllantysiliogogogoch. So the axe has already fallen on a chunk of Welsh language TV station S4C. S4C is a  Daily Mail news editor’s wet dream. It receives in excess of £100m a year from HM Government and is currently trying hard to explain how it officially recorded zero viewers on 196 out of its 890 programmes during one month earlier this year. (Indeed, just 139 of the station’s entire output for the period were watched by more than 10,000 viewers.)
 
The estimable Julia Hobsbawn of Editorial Intelligence invited me to the first of her ‘Names Not Numbers’ get-togethers in Port Merion. When we all arrived, we were addressed by the Presiding Officer of the Welsh parliament Dafydd Elis-Thomas. Despite the fact that not one member of his audience understood the language (and his fluency in English), Mr Thomas addressed us in Welsh. We were all supplied with expensive Sennheiser headphone and a simultaneous translation – all no doubt paid for by the taxpayer.  
 
You could argue this was not only silly but slightly discourteous. Nelson Mandela didn’t open the World Cup with an oration in Xhosa. But apparently if it got out Lord Elis-Thomas had uttered a word in public in the language of the imperialists he’d have been lynched on his arrival back in the Caerdydd (Cardiff). Yaki da, (iechyd da) your Lordship.  
 
All this, and Tom Jones didn’t even get to Number One this weekend. What hope is there for the Welsh when that happens?