“Uncle Herbert” causes trouble – Handelsblatt Morning Briefing

We have to imagine the factory hall in Wolfsburg at Volkswagen as a planche on which employees and employers are constantly wielding foil and swords. The announcement by CEO Herbert Diess to have the first works meeting in two years next week is of a somewhat coarser nature – because of an investor trip to the USA and because the invitation was too short-term.

Everyone else can ask questions online. Cavallo speaks of “personal profiling on the back of the workforce”. Comedian Heinz Erhardt saw it more mellow: “As long as there is hair, people lie in it.”

The VW boss, whom they all too affectionately called “Uncle Herbert”, will certainly talk about Tesla and electric cars. If you want to know something about funding programs, the eco-weakness of plug-in hybrid vehicles or the CO2 targets of the industry, we have something to offer on the Wolfsburg boss event day. Handelsblatt author Stefan Menzel speaks to car expert Ferdinand Dudenhöffer on Thursday at 5 p.m. – Be there online! Register here.

Today, Wednesday, the SPD, the Greens and the FDP will for the first time present things in common on their march into the temporary government working group. They aim at an “orderly end” to the “epidemic situation of national importance”.

The old Bundestag had initially fixed this until the end of November. The new regulations in the Infection Protection Act are intended to enable the countries to react flexibly to Corona. Key points are planned in a transitional regulation that will run until March 2022.

Angela Merkel, who has been responsible for the corona policy so far sat on Tuesday at the constituent session of the 20th Bundestag with glasses in the stands. Later that evening she and her cabinet were officially dismissed by Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. In the short term, you still govern in a somewhat listless and “executive” manner.

The Biontech vaccine could soon be approved for children in the United States.

Biontech, The Republic’s innovation rocket, continues to expand. An advisory body to the US FDA has now recommended that the vaccine from the Mainz couple Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci should be given emergency approval for five to eleven year olds.

The FDA is likely to follow this vote. A vaccination campaign for 28 million affected American children could start in November. The government plans to deliver 15 million doses of vaccine to paediatricians, clinics and pharmacies shortly after approval.

In Europe, Biontech and its partner Pfizer have also applied for approval for children. And Biontech is also active in Africa. In mid-2022, they want to start building a factory for their own vaccine production. A huge production network is to be created on the African continent.

The United Nations want to shake things up shortly before the start of the world climate conference COP26 in Glasgow. In their new climate report it is stated that the states would have to increase their climate efforts sevenfold if they wanted to achieve the agreed 1.5-degree target.

According to the status quo, greenhouse gas emissions could only be reduced by 7.5 percent by 2030, and a 55 percent decrease is necessary. If everything goes on like this, it will be 2.7 degrees warmer on earth by 2100, according to the UN.

Apparently the EU Commission is also thinking of using new nuclear and gas-fired power plants. According to the new EU standard, they are to be regarded as sustainable investments within the framework of the “taxonomy” – and would be strongly promoted.

EU leader Ursula von der Leyen intoned this turnaround at the last EU summit on October 22nd – environmentalists are now submitting a petition to protest against the “greenwashing” of nuclear and gas in Brussels.

He drives a BMW, is 52 years old, is male, works 47 hours a week and earns 176,000 euros a year. So this is what the typical managing director of a German GmbH looks likeAs the market researchers from BBE Media found together with the German Association of Tax Advisors in a study that is available to our editorial team. Colleagues are only known here in nine percent of the cases.

It is as if the secretary was still called Rehbein and as if the boy group around the boss was still fetching the cigars from the humidor at the end of the day. This logic includes that women managing directors earn significantly less with 145,000 euros. So you can see what small difference a Y chromosome makes from an X chromosome.

Google generates around a fifth of its income from ads.

Small dispute over the interpretive sovereignty of the Alphabet share, the Google mother. Is it a triumph if third-quarter revenue grew 42 percent year over year to $ 65.1 billion (an expected $ 63.4 billion)? What if net income climbed 68 percent to $ 18.9 billion in three months? That is how much Bertelsmann does in one year.

Or is it cause for skepticism because the advertising revenues of the video sausage machine Youtube only rose to 7.2 billion dollars (expected: 7.4 billion)? And the Google Cloud sales of $ 4.99 billion were below expectations of $ 5.07 billion.

In any case, the share price fell slightly, as Google Cloud and Youtube are the group’s biggest growth drivers. We learn from Warren Buffett: “Price is what you pay, value is what you get.”

A big hit with global financial investors in recent years has been the “private credit” division, borrowing money for economic campaigns. Private equity groups in particular have done well in the shadow banking system. A market of around a trillion dollars was created.

Now the warning comes from the rating agency Moody’s: “Explosive growth” leads to “systemic risk”. The reasons are the great lack of transparency in this moneylender business, the loans are not tradable and the standards are eroding.

The rating agency’s conclusion: “Risks that pile up beyond the spotlights of public investors and regulators are difficult to quantify, even if they have major economic consequences.” It becomes uncomfortable here too, because too much money is on the way.

And then there is Sabine Kunst, President of the Berlin Humboldt University and Social Democrat, who apparently spectacularly announced her resignation out of frustration with her comrades.

She is protesting against the new Berlin higher education law of the SPD Green Left government. The scientific policy decisions taken there are “well meant, but badly done”, she believes, a variation of the old saying: “The opposite of good is not bad, but well meant.”

Art is bothered by the fact that universities generally have to employ postdocs for qualification positions without a deadline, but the budget does not increase. Art: “We without resources, now immediately, without transition, knocking off our feet, that is not possible.”

In Bavaria, this action is seen as “Watschn”, in Berlin as a “whistle” for the outgoing Governing Mayor Michael Müller. He increasingly ruled with “Murphy’s Law”: “Everything that can go wrong will go wrong.”

I wish you a happy day without Murphy’s law.

Greetings you warmly
you
Hans-Jürgen Jakobs
Senior editor

You can subscribe to the Morning Briefing here:

.
source site