From China’s point of view, the West has twice signaled blatant weakness. Once with Brexit, on the other hand with the election of the political jumping-in field Donald Trump as US President.
Both times Vladimir Putin’s disinformation army got involved. These events were the prelude and encouragement to China’s plan for world conquest. The Ukraine war is now driving the People’s Republic to a weakened Russian Federation as a partner and the USA to a European Union that has not achieved its goals.
Handelsblatt chief economist Bert Rürup takes a deep look at this bipolar new world order. He describes how export star Germany has benefited from selling goods everywhere.
From Feldherrnhügel you can see Germany in an uncomfortable pincer position. Dependent on China for the supply of raw materials and product sales, politically in turn increasingly tied to the US, which is becoming ever stronger.
German companies cannot escape the increasing pressure to relocate more and more investments and jobs to the USA, writes Rürup. His conclusion about the bipolar trend: “This development would be fatal for Germany, the big winner of globalization.”
Growth weaknesses are emerging. All that remains is the subtle hint that the local industry has still adapted well – and Germany also survived the first Cold War well. “The solution is always simple, you just have to find it”the Russian writer and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn knew.
(Photo: via REUTERS)
Part of this two-block strategy is the joint intention of China and Russia to dismantle the dollar as reserve currency. Both countries agreed that Russia would pay for Chinese supplies in renminbi, and the People’s Republic would pay in rubles for Russian raw materials.
With a decree that takes effect today, petro-capitalist Putin wants to get the ruble rolling again. It is ordered that western gas customers must have both a ruble account and a foreign currency account with Gazprombank.
A complicated roundabout: the gas is paid for in euros or dollars, as usual, the bank then sells the currency on the Moscow stock exchange and credits the amount received to the ruble account. If one’s own money is always worth less in real terms, the demand for it has to be staged by oneself.
Note: When it comes to scenery construction, Russia is as strong as the dance department at the Bolshoi Theater.
Not only the Putinian Gazprombank is exempt from the sanctions, but also Rosneft Germany and Gazprom Germania. But the restrictions are also affecting the branches of the Russian oil and gas companies.
A “technical bankruptcy” is possible, the Federal Ministry of Economics believes – and according to our information, expropriation and nationalization of the two systemically important companies are already being carried out internally. If they fell, the energy supply in Germany would be endangered.
Incidentally, during a visit to Germany, ex-boxing world champion Wladimir Klitschko, brother of the mayor of Kyiv, described the continued German payments for Russian energy as “blood money”. Support shouldn’t just consist of words: “Those who are passive have blood on their hands. Being passive means participating, looking the other way means participating.”
My cultural tip for the weekend: “Putin’s Net” by Catherine Belton, the investigative report of the hour. He describes how the Russian President rules a state with the help of former KGB agents and indulges in Greater Slavic phantasmagoria. In her book, which has now also been published in German, the author tells the long story of domestic and foreign policy crimes in this clandestine system.
You can see a blood trail of violence leading straight to Ukraine. And one learns that the new tragedy in Russia cannot be understood without the Western companies, which bought into the new state capitalism with Putin and secret service contacts and earned all of them.
The most beautiful stories are written by life, the even more beautiful ones by crooks. Which brings us to Wirecard, the Dax group that wasn’t one. In our weekend report “The Crown Witness” we portray the man the prosecutors are counting on in the Wirecard case: ex-manager Oliver Bellenhaus, 49, once residing on the 93rd floor of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, currently living in Munich-Stadelheim. He has admitted to falsifying accounts, all allegedly under the eyes of CEO Markus Braun, who denies it.
This Bellenhaus played paintball with the fugitive CEO Jan Marsalek, founded front companies, was equipped with a banknote counting machine, saw golf as something for “gays, I always say” and revealed to an acquaintance: “You can never have enough money, power, horsepower and chicks .”
The biggest balance sheet fraud in Germany “just happened”, you just “fiddled”, the time at Wirecard was a “super cool life”. The correctional facility won’t quite be able to keep up.
(Photo: Mona Eing & Michael Meissner)
Julia Stoschek is “Hidden Champion” twice: as an active shareholder of the Coburg car supplier Brose (windows, doors, seating systems) and as a collector of video and media art of global importance.
Her “Julia Stoschek Collection” started 15 years ago in Düsseldorf, and it has now been supplemented by virtual access, further training for curators, research offers and exhibition spaces in Berlin.
Your anniversary exhibition deals with the topic of gaming. “With so many users worldwide, you simply have to take care of this topic.” The loss that Brose experienced for the first time in 2021, combined with the loss of dividends, also affected them: “I have a fixed budget plan for the collection. It takes a lot of heart, passion, time and money.”
She comments briefly that ZDF chief satirist Jan Böhmermann keeps dealing with the Stoschek family and involvement in the Nazi era, it couldn’t be any shorter: “I’ve heard about the show, but never seen one.”
And then there is Finland, directed by Sanna Marin, 36, entertained by director Aki Kaurismäki, performed by jazz pianist Iiro Rantala, a zone of occasionally offbeat accents. It has been voted the happiest country in the world for the fifth year in a row, according to the Gallup World Happiness Report.
Like Finland, Denmark and Iceland as second and third also stand for Scandinavian values: high life expectancy, high per capita income, social assistance, low corruption, generosity and freedom to lead one’s own life.
The happiness report published by the UN Sustainable Solutions Network also has a surprising result. In times of Covid-19, social goodness has increased – measured by donations, help for strangers and honorary posts.
US writer Pearl S. Buck had the following advice for fortune seekers: “Many miss the little happiness while they wait in vain for the big one.”
I wish you a happy weekend, in small and large doses.
It greets you cordially
Her
Hans Jürgen Jakobs