Part of the snapshot of the stock exchanges is that a ray of sunshine suddenly appears, where yesterday, according to almost everyone, the darkest darkness spread. Beware of apocalyptists! You can point to the US as proof, where inflation is not as bad as expected: prices rose “only” 8.5 percent in July compared to a year ago. The experts had expected 0.2 points more, because in June the price increase was still 9.1 percent. Ulrich Kater, chief economist at Dekabank in Frankfurt am Main, judges: “The peak of inflation is over.”
Stockbrokers in the US see it the way the man from the savings bank fund does, for example with a view to the rapidly falling gasoline prices. The Dow Jones index gained 535 points last night (up 1.6 percent), US Treasury yields collapsed and US interest rates are only expected to rise by half a percentage point in the near future – and no longer by 0.75 points .
Conclusion: The mini change for the better makes us think of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the master of speech and thought from Frankfurt and Weimar: “One should rarely despair of impossible things, never of difficult ones.”
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It’s not surprising, given the blackmail policy orchestrated by Vladimir Putin in the style of KGB methods – but the little sales message reads very nicely. Our calculations show that sales of gas heaters in Germany will collapse, by ten percent in the second quarter alone. On the other hand, the heating engineers delivered 25 percent more heat pumps in the first half of the year than in the same period last year. And so it should go on.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz is also alarmed that the price of gas has increased more than sixfold. When he recently visited the heating engineer Viessmann, the social democrat demonstratively turned a screw in an almost finished heat pump: It is about “modern technologies” that enable us “to use heat and protect our climate without resorting to fossil resources”, so scholz Technocrats clearly love technical terms more than power words.
For two and a half years, Ulrike Malmendier had only one word ready for the federal government: “No!” The behavioral economist, who teaches at California’s Berkeley University, kept the doers in Berlin from wanting to make them the new “business wise men”. A sentence from the Chancellery Minister Wolfgang Schmidt (SPD) finally impressed her, she tells my colleague Julian Olk: “Don’t just whine, just get involved.” In the Handelsblatt interview, she said quite “hands-on” about…
- her new job: “Economics is an international subject. An American perspective can certainly help the German Council of Experts.”
- a new advisory body within the government: “I still believe that it would make sense to create such a body as well. Lars Feld, chief adviser in the Federal Ministry of Finance, is the best example and, in my opinion, could become a blueprint.”
- reforms: “Each autumn, the Council publishes hundreds of pages of its annual report. However, it is a long way from some debates in terms of time. I also believe that it would make more sense if the Council were not located far away from politics in Wiesbaden, but also had a branch in Berlin. And the Council should further develop its self-image, more into a kind of incubator.”
So if at some point, as Malmendier wanted, a number of politicians, economists and experts were to discuss current problems such as the gas emergency earlier in an economic-political incubator, they would end up singing in unison like Marlene Dietrich once did: “I still have a suitcase in Berlin / He stays there too and that makes sense.”
The “cold progression” is so uncomfortable that you can actually catch a cold from it. The catchphrase says quite simply that with high inflation, incomes rise so much that disproportionately rising tax rates de facto dampen higher wages again. Finance Minister Christian Lindner has now invented a model for protection against the cold, which is intended to reach the “broad middle of society” as an “Inflation Compensation Act”. The FDP boss promises: 48 million Germans should benefit if the limits of the tax classes were actually pushed back in 2023.
But especially for the Greens, Lindner’s relief is an impertinence. Typical Andreas Audretsch, deputy head of the parliamentary group in the Bundestag: “Tax cuts in the billions, from which top earners benefit three times as much as people with low incomes, ignore reality.” Perhaps the opponents will soon have to attend a conflict management seminar.
Crimea is in a panic, the peninsula that Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev gave to Ukraine on a whim in 1954. Driven by his successor, a military offensive is supposed to change everything. But Ukraine is fighting back. On Tuesday there was an attack on an air force base north of Sevastopol in Putin’s re-occupied Crimea. The runway of the military airport and an ammunition depot are affected – bad conditions for planes that are supposed to take off here with rockets towards southern Ukraine.
Russian tourists have fled the chaos by the sea in droves. Finally, a video shows a woman who bursts into tears because of the abrupt end of her vacation: “I don’t want to leave Crimea.” She had just gotten used to living here, “it feels like home”. The video also shows what appears to be a mile-long traffic jam. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the first servant of his people, makes an announcement: “The Black Sea region cannot be safe as long as Crimea is occupied. This Russian war against Ukraine, against all free Europe, started with Crimea and must end with Crimea, with its liberation.”
When the Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder, who tends to spread his legs, soon dismisses everyone who has doubts about his energy policy, he only has to be reminded of an interview with his party colleague Ilse Aigner on “Zeit Online”. The resistance of the CSU against the construction of new power lines was a serious mistake in the opinion of the state parliament president. This is another reason why Bavaria is “more dependent than others on nuclear power plants for electricity and there are bottlenecks in the lines from north to south”.
In 2015, as Bavarian Energy Minister, she campaigned for the routes to the then Prime Minister Horst Seehofer and then Home Minister Söder, both also CSU, but failed. “Unfortunately, I didn’t always get through with the facts,” says Aigner. She complies with the obligatory praise from the CSU by pointing out that “we are clearly at the top when it comes to the expansion of solar energy, hydroelectric power and biomass”.
And then there is the great football country of Qatar, currently a German local recreation area in terms of energy policy. The word is now coming from the emirate on the Gulf that the World Cup is scheduled to begin there on November 20, 2022, and not just on November 21. It will then be Sunday of the Dead in this country when the home team will play the opening game against Ecuador – in the desert, far outside the capital Doha, in the second largest stadium (60,000 spectators).
Qatar should definitely make the first push, according to the director’s plan. You can’t refuse the generous hosts’ wish, and remember Dieter Hildebrandt: “Instead of complaining that we don’t have everything we want, we should rather be grateful that we don’t get everything we deserve.”
I wish you a happy day where there is nothing to complain about.
Her
Hans Jürgen Jakobs
Senior editor