The US and the Saudis

But now oil is a weapon in the hands of the warmonger Vladimir Putin – and the cartel Opec plus the oil exporting countries around the Saudis decided to produce more “black gold” in the summer than before. The associated drop in gasoline prices was promptly welcomed by the USA, and the reduced quantities from Russia can be offset. The next unexpected step: Biden is said to be traveling to Saudi Arabia at the end of June and meeting the crown prince. His half-brother recently discussed the trip with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Washington.

The hectic oil diplomacy gives a glimpse of how the Ukraine war and sanctions against Moscow are hitting the global economy. All of a sudden, fossil raw materials – just a phased-out model – are in great demand and the German plans for the energy transition seem outdated. The total turn to renewable energies is the future narrative of all climate activists, but this competes with short-term desires for security of supply.

In our weekend report we investigate this conflict of interest. It seems clear that wind turbines, photovoltaics and hydrogen will only be available to the required extent in decades. Our editors answer 30 questions about the only half-successful energy transition in the title complex. One of them is: “What would a speed limit of 130 kilometers per hour really do?” Answer: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 1.5 million tons a year – that is, by almost five percent.

There is currently a toxic cocktail out there for anyone involved in venture capital and startups. Its components are inflation, higher interest rates and falling company valuations. This is dangerous for all company bosses who are still accumulating huge operational losses because they still want to grow into the profit zones of the future. But this spiral of happiness is becoming a “death spiral” for some these days.

That’s why the US venture capital legend with the five consonants, Sequoia, issued a warning in a letter to the companies in its portfolio. Now “survival of the quickest” is announced, it is important to get the costs under control quickly. Order: turn back, march! In the fight against bankruptcy, employees are already being laid off, for example at the Swedish payment service provider Klarna, the most valuable start-up in Europe to date. Every tenth of the 7000 employees have to go there. The paranoia that is common in the industry leads to one realization: those who continue to burn money will eventually look at the ashes of their business.

The problem with this development is that there is just as much downward exaggeration as there was previously upward exaggeration. Even business concepts that are viable in the long term could be crushed in the stampede of shaky and fleeing financiers. It has become rare for Bosch to set up a fifth fund for start-up financing of over 250 million euros. And so a new start-up strategy from the Federal Ministry of Economics falls like manna from a cloudy sky. While it was once the greatest example of courage for Vice Chancellor Philipp Rösler (FDP) to want to revive the “New Market” for young tech companies, Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck (Greens) is now really going all out. According to the 28-page plan paper available to us, in the future start-ups

• Pension insurance companies can invest a fixed proportion of their premium income in venture capital,
• the management fees charged by fund investors are exempt from nineteen percent sales tax,
• Stock options for employees are fiscally better off as part of a tax reform and
• public contracts are increasingly going to young companies.

Sounds like a future program against the “death spiral”. In Berlin, they apparently learned from Albert Einstein: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

My cultural tip for the weekend: “Borgen” on Netflix, a new season of the Danish politainment series that started in 2010. Like “Sex and the City”, this glamor product of television culture returns after a few years’ break, as if the life depicted had always gone on like this.

We watch the aging of Denmark’s powerhouse nine years later. The politician Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen) is no longer an unhappily married prime minister, but single and foreign minister who is struggling with the consequences of an oil discovery off Greenland and her own menopause. She has mastered the art of political intrigue with great skill, but also with more aggressive tones. Times are like this.

The new era is based on Queen Elizabeth II, just as the system of latitude and longitude is based on Greenwich. So the questions are: Was Winston Churchill really still in office when she ascended the throne? How many US Presidents, Chancellors and Fifa Presidents has the Queen seen? What are the Beatles compared to the Iron Man from Buckingham Palace?

The four-day platinum celebration of 70 years of royalty is a cross-media Great Britain show, where it became the big news that the 96-year-old will not be able to attend the thanksgiving service in St. Paul’s in her honor this Friday. She is exhausted. After all, the party is supposed to continue on Saturday and Sunday. In some media, of course, Amber Heard’s mental state after her court defeat against Johnny Depp took even more prominent space. And the “Frankfurter Allgemeine” did not take the cultural-anthropological reference that the satirical song “God Save The Queen” by the “Sex Pistols” was published in 1977 to mark Elizabeth’s 25th anniversary. The punks roared grotesquely, mega-royally: “Oh God, save history”.

And then there is Peter Dussmann (1938 to 2013), who left behind a billion-dollar company with its cleaning services, Kursana nursing homes and a culture department store, but also a bizarre inheritance dispute. His daughter Angela is currently suing her mother, the US-born widow Catherine von Fürstenberg-Dussmann, in front of the Berlin district court. The accusation: inability to inherit.

The mother had a first correct will replaced by a second manipulated one in 2010, when CEO Dussmann was already in need of serious care. Therefore, as previously agreed, the plaintiff was entitled to 50 percent of the inherited company and not just the mandatory 25 percent. It’s about a few hundred million euros, a doctor’s report and a broken mother-daughter relationship. The public is locked out of this process, but learns everything. Where there is fighting to the point of blood, one does not remain alone. We prefer to end with Wilhelm Busch in the romantic: “But the most beautiful thing here on earth / is to love and to be loved.”

I wish you a loving weekend.

Best regards
Her
Hans Jürgen Jakobs
Senior editor