the horror in Ukraine, which has already driven three million people to flee, leads to a direct duel between Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden. All restraint is gone. For the first time, the US President says publicly that his colleague from the Kremlin is a “war criminal”. Although this assessment is in line with the International Court of Justice in The Hague, which ordered an immediate stop to the war of aggression, it is received in Moscow as an almost welcome provocation.
Biden’s criminal verdict came immediately after Volodymyr Zelensky delivered a moving video speech to the US Congress. The Ukrainian President played apocalyptic images of dead people, crying children and destroyed cities, and announced that Russia had turned the skies over Ukraine into a source of death for thousands of people. Biden is fulfilling the desire for guns with another $800 million aid package. Anti-aircraft missiles, drones and thousands of anti-tank weapons are supplied. And promised are anti-aircraft systems with even greater range.
Russia fires back with conspiracy theories. In a video conference, Vladimir Putin was martial in the style of Chechnya President Ramzan Kadyrov. After earlier claims that neo-Nazis ruled Kyiv, he now says Ukraine is cooperating with the US in “experimenting African swine fever, cholera and the coronavirus” to produce bio-weapons.
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The West wants to “smash” and “abolish” Russia. Many countries “reconciled themselves to living with their backs bent, but Russia will never be in such a miserable and humiliated state.” Putin also vented his anger at decadent oligarchs, assuring that the “special operation” in Ukraine would be “carried out to the end.”
His announcement: “The current format is the only possible one.”
Putinism, as the extreme form of functionary radicalism, contrasts one hundred percent with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s suggestions that a compromise is possible in the negotiations with Ukraine. The invaded country would remain neutral, would not join NATO and would receive a state guarantee. But everyone knows that it’s definitely not worth the paper it’s written on.
In 1994, when Ukraine gave up its own nuclear weapons, Russia had already assured that it would always respect the sovereignty of its sister country. In this war, it would be a mistake to accept the philosopher Ludwig Marcuse’s description of a “peaceful man” as one who “allows himself to be shot to prove that the other was an aggressor”.
Dramatic price increases are part of the “perfect storm” that the state and society are facing. The specter of inflation is back, and with it the specter of raising interest rates. After the last report of an increase of 7.9 percent on the inflation front, the US Federal Reserve is taking action. It raises the key interest rate by 0.25 percentage points, it is now in a range of 0.25 to 0.50 percent. This is the first interest rate hike in Washington since late 2018. US Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell: “The war is creating further inflationary pressures and will hit the economy in many ways.”
His action, however, will neither lower skyrocketing energy prices nor prevent stagflation. Powell even anticipates this in his forecast for 2022: After that, inflation will rise to 4.2 percent (previously 2.6 percent), and growth will drop to just 2.8 percent (previously 4.0 percent). Since the Fed considers a price increase level of 1.9 percent to be appropriate for the end of 2022, the financial industry is firmly expecting several interest rate hikes this year.
The inevitably rising interest rates also threaten the “dolce vita” of the Dax companies, which could happily buy other companies or their own shares on credit. “Financial engineering” and the continued purchases of corporate bonds by the European Central Bank (ECB) made the miracle possible that the interest burden did not increase significantly. But now, with the interest rate turnaround, some people are getting queasy because the net financial debt of the Dax giants has risen from 140 billion to 273 billion euros within a decade.
This sum results from our calculations. By the way, the debt king is Deutsche Telekom with 132 billion euros. And at Delivery Hero – a loss-making food delivery company who is considered a “techie” – the relation between debt and the result of entrepreneurial activity is so bad that one can wonder what this “hero” is doing in the Dax.
Anyone looking for large oligopolies and wondering what has become of good old competition need only look at the energy market. There is Gazprom, an unsavory state-owned company that controls 40 percent of Germany’s total natural gas consumption. There are still the four electricity giants RWE, EnBW, Eon and Vattenfall, and finally there are very few gas station chains that happily ask you to pay.
And so we arrive at the paradox that oil prices are falling but gas prices remain high. There is good reason to be suspicious. So asks Minister of Economics Robert Habeck is now asking the Federal Cartel Office to examine whether mineral oil companies and refineries are excluding motorists with illegal price agreements. It should not be “that companies make inappropriate profits from the current situation”. No, of course not, but every war attracts war winners.
And since we’re already on the cartel question, it’s worth taking a look at France. There, the cloud computing company OVHcloud has filed a lawsuit with the EU Commission against the giant Microsoft, a regular customer of the international competition authorities. The Wall Street Journal reported on it. The allegations relate to the way Microsoft licenses its products, especially the office software used in many offices. In the end, this policy makes it more expensive to use the cloud service of a provider that competes with Microsoft’s “Azure” offer.
In Germany, the Stuttgart company Nextcloud had already complained to the Federal Cartel Office about the US group in November. Gone are the days when everyone railed against Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon – and forgot about Microsoft.
And then there’s Howard Schultz, 68, originator of the business idea of finding a paying audience all over the world with Italian-style American coffee in sparsely furnished rooms with the charm of a shared flat. So it’s about Starbucks and the repeated comeback of the founder – who will now be the predecessor and successor of the previous boss Kevin Johnson until the fall. Schultz, who would have loved to run as the Democratic presidential nominee in 2020, is the One Dollar Man.
In any case, his introduction is very presidential: “If you love something, then you have a sense of responsibility to help when you are called.” Miguel de Cervantes, author of “Don Quijote”, would have put it a little differently: “Everything that love waiting is the opportunity.”
I wish you a successful day with the right opportunities.
It greets you cordially
Her
Hans Jürgen Jakobs
PS: Despite rising incidence values, most of the corona rules could be abolished on March 20th. We are interested in your opinion: Which easing do you currently think is justifiable – and which ones are premature? What is your position on an extension of the corona restrictions? What about the mask, what about the obligation to test? Is it enough if the federal states decide in future which protective measures should apply in hotspots? Write us your opinion in five sentences [email protected]. We will publish selected articles with attribution on Thursday in print and online.
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