Russian aggression is still the best stimulus for unity on the continent. So now representatives from 44 countries met at the European summit in Prague.
Today, Friday, the EU will talk in Prague about a Europe-wide cap on wholesale gas prices – 15 out of 27 EU countries are in favour. However, Germany, which would have to pay a lot for it, is against it.
Many Europeans sharply criticize the fact that the naysayer relieves the burden on their own citizens with 200 billion euros. Estonia’s Prime Minister Kaja Kallas: “The problem is that each country puts together its own package.”
A completely different question is whether Berlin’s flagship Europeans are illegally distorting competition with double booms.
The economists of the German expert commission will present their own concept for the gas price brake on Monday. They are not convinced by the federal government’s model of subsidizing up to 80 percent of average consumption.
In this way, the savings potential of the economy would not be fully exploited. They are therefore working on a special solution for companies, also alarmed by a sharp decline in the Ifo business climate index for micro-enterprises and the self-employed. The value fell by eight points to 21 points in September – a low. Beyond the giants like Uniper, which enjoy the greatest state aid, the hut is burning.
That is another reason why, according to a current ARD survey, only 29 percent of Germans are satisfied with the traffic light. Only 20 percent describe the economic situation as very good or good. And if there were a federal election on Sunday, the Union (28 percent) would win ahead of the Greens (19 percent) and the SPD (17 percent), whose Olaf Scholz would then have plenty of time for Hamburg tasks.
On Vladimir Putin’s 70th birthday this Friday, one wonders whether he will receive cards, letters or perhaps rancid chocolates from Western heads of state and government.
Putin will celebrate in his hometown of St. Petersburg in the magnificent Constantine Palace. An “informal summit” of the heads of state of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) is planned. The guest list: secret.
The Russian President mainly wants to work, maybe read one or the other article on the day of honor, in which Germany will always play a role. After all, he had played an important role as a KGB agent in Dresden during the GDR era, as indicated by Stasi documents.
Putin experienced the withdrawal of the Soviet army as a disgrace, which he has long compensated for with a secret service state in which ex-agents have the most important jobs. But the young, the educated, the wealthy are leaving. Yale professor Timothy Snyder writes in an essay: “The earth has moved under Putin’s feet.”
According to the Ukraine expert, Putin has “driven his senseless war so far that even the Russian information space is beginning to crumble”.
The euro as a catalyst for European unity and as a counterweight to the dollar – this perspective moved the continent’s top politicians 30 years ago. Professor Bert Rürup, President of the Handelsblatt Research Institute (HRI), draws a rather sobering summary of the common currency in the column “Der Chefökonom” today. This is of course due to the current weak exchange rate of 0.983 dollars for one euro, a long way from the 1.60 euros in 2008, but also to fundamental trends.
The greenback is dominating the global financial system “like seldom before,” said Rürup. The dollar is involved in almost nine out of ten currency transactions and accounts for 60 percent of global central bank reserves.
The strong dollar is currently also driving inflation in this country. More Europe is the answer, so the conclusion, but at least a European Ministry of Finance, Europe must take responsibility together.
Unfortunately, as with François de La Rochefoucauld: “The desire to appear clever and competent often prevents us from becoming so.”
Careful readers and listeners of this morning briefing may have noticed a significant rise in the use of the word “monopoly” in recent weeks. This was inevitably connected to the work on my book “The Monopoly of the 21st Century”.
Our current weekend title (“The New Power of Monopolies”) summarizes why the worrying increase in economic concentration worldwide is also a driver of inflation: This is due to the “pricing power” of big oligopolists. You notice it in sectors such as gas, oil, logistics, shipowners, IT, retail, building materials and industrial gases.
All the important production factors of the modern information society – data, capital, raw materials – have long had a trend towards agglomeration of power. If things continued like this, at some point Europe would only have the choice of being dependent on private, state-sponsored US monopolies (Amazon, Microsoft & Co) or on state, privately-sponsored Chinese monopolies.
Not to leave you completely depressed: Unlike in the past, at least competition authorities in the USA, Europe and Germany are dealing with the problem. Outcome uncertain.
You may have never heard of Monheim am Rhein, despite 850 years of history and a UNESCO World Heritage Site (Bürgel House). Unless you want to use Germany’s largest tax haven as an entrepreneur.
The rate of trade tax on profits here is only 250 percent, well below the German average rate of 435 percent. Of the 90 German trade tax havens, only the town of Zossen near Berlin and the municipality of Grünwald near Munich, which is popular with FC Bayern players’ wives, have a similar importance.
Since no idyll lasts forever, the NRW state government intervenes and wants to clean up the mailbox company landscape. Poaching tactics like the one in Monheim are “lacking solidarity”, railed Simon Rock from the Greens: In the future, such municipalities should pay a small compensation for poorer municipalities via “negative key allocations”.
My cultural tip for the weekend: “The Mother of Invention” by Katrine Marçal, an insightful history of innovation from a gender perspective. The introduction of the trolley suitcase was once delayed by a few years because men wanted to continue to prove their masculinity by carrying suitcases.
And if the electric car drive hadn’t been defamed as “feminine” 100 years ago, we would probably have saved ourselves many stinking combustion engines. The Swedish author has many such examples ready, which she happily spreads out.
The book is on the shortlist for our German Business Book Prize 2022, and for the first time we are also awarding a reader’s prize. You are asked: Which is the best business book of the year? Go here to vote.
Since weekend time is also reading time, we’ll just end this wake-up call with books. There is, for example, Annie Ernaux, 82, who deserves to be the first French writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Much of her novels are openly autobiographical. In her autobiography “The Years” she wrote that she was looking for her own language in order to understand her life, in order to be able to read it.
Ernaux said a few months ago that writing is “memory work”. The taboo subjects of that time – sexuality, politics, femininity, abortion, violence – were the material for her books. The key work of the former teacher, who grew up in modest circumstances in Normandy, is “The Shame”.
It begins with: “In the early afternoon of a Sunday in June, my father wanted to kill my mother.”
And then there’s Pulitzer Prize-winning US writer Maggie Haberman. The recognized journalist of the “New York Times” was once even appreciated by Donald Trump – until her book about him was recently published. Now he speaks of “fake”.
In “Confidence Man,” Haberman, who has had several interviews with the one-time (and future?) US President, really doesn’t leave out a juicy anecdote. Trump is said to have called his righteous guest from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Angela Merkel, “that bitch”.
Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis – archrival among the Republicans – is a “whineer” and “fat”, son-in-law Jared Kushner, on the other hand, is much too thin and “sapless and weak”.
Trump’s appearance after his Covid recovery was apparently inspired by the soul singer James Brown, who often tore his jacket off his body on stage: Trump also triumphantly pulled his mask off his face when he left the hospital. The President actually wanted to unbutton his shirt and reveal a Superman T-shirt. But he decided against this gag.
Trump may have read too many Clark Kent comics: “There’s a superhero in all of us, we just have to have the guts to put on the cloak.”
I wish you an entertaining, relaxing weekend.
It greets you cordially
Her
Hans Jürgen Jakobs
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