Morning Briefing: How inflation fear works

• Risk one: Due to rapid aging in industrialized countries, workers are becoming scarce. Then wages rise – and then prices. There is still no sign of this spiral.
• Risk two: The fight against the climate catastrophe causes high costs. Consumers feel higher CO2 prices directly for gasoline and heating fuels, which would have less of an impact if behavior changes, as desired.
• Risk three: The beneficial effect of unleashed globalization, in which competition has dampened prices, diminishes sharply in the course of economic wars and protectionism.
• Risk four: The galloping national debt is a problem when central banks have to move away from zero interest rates due to the risk of inflation. In any case, the ultra-lax monetary policy has led to an oversupply of capital, which in turn has resulted in extreme real estate prices.

There is only one thing worse than the fear of inflation at the moment: the fear of stagflation . High prices and little growth were the toxic mix of the 1970s. For the European Central Bank (ECB) , the guardian of money, a certain chain of effects is fatal: The more people talk about inflation, the higher it gets. The German board member Isabel Schnabel assures that one will “react decisively” if – beyond temporary fluctuations – inflationary pressure builds up, that endangers the target of two percent inflation. So far, however, there is no sign, according to Schnabel, that people are spending their high savings on a large scale. She firmly rejects the suspicion that the lowest interest rates would be retained as protection for the heavily indebted countries in southern Europe. As a precaution, we will describe where money is still safe – and where not . A moral German foreign policy would have to provide sanctions against China, which a pragmatic foreign policy cannot afford. The economic ties are getting stronger, as the auto industry shows . Take Daimler, for example: If the truck subsidiary, which is heavily influenced by the US, is split off in Stuttgart on Friday, the high Asian dependency in the passenger car business will have a full impact. 32 percent of sales come from there. And with Geely and BAIC, Chinese are the most important Daimler – shareholders. The Volkswagen Group , whose parent brand almost 50 percent of the cars in China sold. BMW comes to 35 percent. And in 2022 the Munich-based company will become even more “Chinese”: Then they will take over the majority in the joint venture with Brilliance and consolidate 75 percent of the balance sheet. All are united by one thought, which the great reformer Deng Xiaoping described: “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is white or black – the main thing is that it catches mice.” From Berlin there are only nervous parade exercises before the coalition acquaintances -Coffee parties between Friday and Tuesday to report . The CSU mocks with some right that in addition to their own five members the CDU with a large contingent of ten people. Greens and FDP each need this man and woman strength, while the