The crowd effect.
I write this post with fun. With fun because I just had a phone call from Italy like "are you in the cold there?" and I “Mom, it's August. It's hot here too ”. I know that the project fear in the newspapers is particularly raging on Germany, but I find it funny because SPD and its newspaper have been shouting “Katastrophe! Katastrophe! ". And you know what the fun part is? Which are 70 YEARS screaming Katastrophe! Katastrophe! (strictly with the accent on the o).
And the Italian newspapers resume.
So, to understand what is happening, one should know the German parties and know how they have financed themselves in the past years. SPD, and I have already said it, in terms of ideas has been dead for years. But from Schröder onwards it has been able to do one thing: to become the Russian and Chinese (generally Asian) chamber of commerce in Germany.
It's not just Schröder, mind you. If you want cheap energy you have to go to producers who are tied to SPDs. If these producers want cheap gas, they have to go to SPD. If you want refuge in Russia after the crack of a "unicorn" (wirecard), over which a minister of the SPD was to watch, you must have the protection of an SPD minister of the economy, in the government at that time.
A lobby has been created around gas (and trade to the east) that revolves entirely around the “SPD” party.
And here we come to the crowd effect: if you take a recording of a panicked crowd, what do you feel? The shrill screams of women and children. Not because males do not scream in fear: simply because women scream louder and the sound is higher. In short, it covers the blasphemies of men.
What you are hearing from Germany today is a crowd effect. Where do you hear those who scream loudest, that is, all the industrialists and energy producers linked to SPD. End.
If you look at FDP, or the Greens, or even CDU / CSU, you don't see panic for winter in the cold. Because there is no panic: there will be no lack of energy. Energy will rise in price. That's all.
Who will have energy? Well those industrialists who over time have been close to other producers (the Scandinavian countries) and other importers / producers (mainly the Dutch) will have it.
But not SPD. SPD is the one who pushed to block the extraction of gas in Germany, with the excuse that it would produce unlikely earthquakes. (Germany has not seen an earthquake since … since … boh) and they were the ones who, at the ministry of industry (remember Gabriel), decided to close the nuclear power plants so as not to be overtaken on the left by the greens. And buy more gas. (Merkel was too obsessed with science to believe the fracking fiction that produces earthquakes).
Overall, gas was (at the peak) 15% of the German energy cocktail. Even if it lost 40% of the imported gas, it would be 6% of the total. Okay, let's say 60%? Okay, so that's 9% of the total.
It is nothing unbearable for the economy as a whole: it is instead unbearable for the SPD economy.
Industrialists close to SPD are those who have had access to the benefits of low-cost gas. VW, for example, which is close (as it turned out) to FDP, had already been on the electricity market for some time through spinoff companies, with contracts that guarantee not to increase the price for twelve months:
https://www.elli.eco/de/gruenstrom
(in practice they will also connect the houses to the gigafactory. The fun part is that that gigantic buffer / reserve also allows you to use solar and wind power)
Moreover, Mercedes is also throwing itself into the electricity market for homes:
I speak of crowd effect because in fact it is the SPD that shouts, and it is the world that revolves around the SPD that shouts louder.
The shouting is SPD. You don't see CDU companies, or CDU politicians, shouting. Those have left the workerism and have concentrated on the world of services from now on. They do not speak of "workers" but of "families". And therefore they are more worried about price increases to families than the rest: German families expect CDU to protect them, and therefore SPD is under pressure to reduce the cost of the bill, which it would like to use to save its own. friends, sons of Russian gas.
In reality, I believe that, as usual, it will be companies that will come to the aid of a government that was already born mediocre, and is proving its mediocrity with each passing day.
For example, I can bet all you want that, with one excuse or another, we will spend the winter in the home office. This will allow service companies (in any Western country we always talk about 50% / 60% of companies) to turn off the heating completely.
I don't know if they will do it for the covid, or for the energy, but in the end the point is that they will. It is too obvious a move.
In general, I would pay less attention to the shouting of these people. Of course, with the gas crisis, those who have enriched themselves with Russian gas are no longer getting rich. And being an economy linked to SPD, clearly they are the ones who shout the most.
Just do tone checks, comparing https://www.handelsblatt.com/ , and https://www.spiegel.de/ to understand which party is suffering from this. Or simply the difference between https://taz.de/ , and https://www.faz.net/aktuell/
In general, I believe that in the end what will happen is that the companies in the service sector, like mine, will tell me to work from home and offer me the usual annual contribution to work from home, like in the years of covid. The decrease in consumption that has already been seen during the covid was (AGEB, 2020), of about 11%.
For the rest, you are looking at the (self-inflicted) problems of the SPD. A party that already today would have no reason to exist.
The things you should worry about, if I were you, about germany are:
- Anti-Americanism grows. Not even the Ukrainian question has changed things. Indeed, the Germans think that it was a wrong position of the US that caused the war. The fact that not even this war is changing things, especially among young people, should be of concern.
- Germany historically expands to the east. To the west the road is closed by the UK and France, to the north by the Scandinavian countries. If it cannot expand materially, it will do so digitally. If I were you I would take a look at digital services: fintech and cloud.
- The extra 100 billion on defense is being spent, but there is no mention of F-35s. On the other hand, Rheinmetall announced record profits, including for overseas sales. While he only gave junk to the Ukrainians to save face, but no more.
Here, instead of suggesting disasters that have not been seen so far, if I were you I would worry about these things.
Maybe it's time your newspapers get interesting?