BERLIN (AFP) - Executives from eight major German companies, including Volkswagen, Adidas and BASF, say the government has not done enough to combat the financial crisis, a magazine reported.
"We must first of all prevent the crisis from becoming a devastating fire," Volkswagen boss Martin Winterkorn said in the issue of Spiegel magazine to appear Monday.
"We are facing a situation that is absolutely extraordinary - and we cannot emerge from it with the traditional political and economic approaches."
Adidas head Herbert Hainer called on the government to "lower taxes to stimulate consumption, such as temporarily lowering the value-added tax from 19 to 16%."
Juergen Hambrecht of chemical industry giant BASF proposed "reducing taxes for low- and mid-level earners" and increasing infrastructure investments.
If the government does not invest now, "it will have to spend even more later to lessen the social consequences of the crisis," said Porsche chief financial officer Holger Haerter.
Banks also came in for criticism, with the boss of auto supplier ZF Friedrichshafen saying they were not providing sufficient credit to customers.
Other executives quoted in the piece include those from Bosch, Bayer and Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG, a printing press manufacturer.
In a separate article to appear on Sunday, the head of German bank Postbank also argued that the government had done too little.
"The government's aid package foresees that a bank must take back its questionable debt at the end of three years," Wolfgang Klein said in Welt am Sonntag.
"And of course an analyst will take that into account... That doesn't move us forward."
Klein said he wanted to see the length of time for the state's guarantee extended.
On Friday, Germany's upper house of parliament approved a package of measures aimed at getting Europe's biggest economy out of recession.
Chancellor Angela Merkel says the package is worth EUR32 billion ($41 billion) and will spark some EUR50 billion worth of economic activity.
The measures include tax breaks for firms, state-backed loans for small and medium-sized companies, exempting new cars from road tax for a year and accelerated state infrastructure spending.
Financial Times Deutschland reported earlier this week that Merkel wants to make her government's banking rescue plan more attractive to lenders that have spurned the initiative.
Merkel and her conservative Christian Democratic Union were said to be mulling a decrease in interest rates paid by banks that ask for guarantees on interbank loans, from the current level of 2.0%.
The party is also considering an extension of the duration of the guarantees to five years from three at present, it added.
Click here to go to Dow Jones NewsPlus, a web front page of today's most important business and market news, analysis and commentary: http://www.djnewsplus.com/al?rnd=3zH%2BT1HmknNr5JebshabcA%3D%3D. You can use this link on the day this article is published and the following day.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 06, 2008 08:56 ET (13:56 GMT)

Publié le 06 Décembre 2008 Copyright © 2008 Dowjones