On November 12th, the Financial Times headlined “Can anything halt the decline of German industry?”, and hid the answer, by hiding what had caused the decline. They also quoted economists (the category of ‘experts’ who had failed to predict the 2008 financial crash) as saying that this decline will stop and will soon reverse:
Most economists believe this debt-financed investment push will swing the country back to growth in 2026 after long years of stagnation.
“At the moment, the headwinds from trade are there before the tailwinds from fiscal policy really kick in,” says BNP Paribas economist Paul Hollingsworth. He is confident that the drag from the trade war has already peaked this year and predicts 1.4 per cent of growth in 2026, after a measly 0.3 per cent in 2025.
Notice that attributing the economic decline to Trump’s “trade war” would place the cause of the decline to have occurred in 2025 — a ludicrous falsehood. However, the article also made passing note of the following crucial fact, which should instead have been the article’s focus: “The number of [Germany’s] unemployed has risen in 37 of 44 months since February 2022 to just under 3mn, the highest level in 14 years.”
Why has Germany’s employment cratered since February 2022? What happened at that time? The Biden-imposed U.S. sanctions against Russia, and U.S. secondary sanctions against countries — such as Germany — that had been importing a lot from Russia (especially fuels), kicked in. The devious U.S. Government, and its deceptive news-media throughout the U.S. empire (such as in Germany), didn’t report that these secondary sanctions would not only hurt Russia (which hurt turned out to have been only little) but also (and much more severely) hurt the countries — especially in Europe — that were importing (especially fuels) from Russia. It hurt those importing countries because fuels are a crucial expense not only to consumers, but especially to manufacturers (that’s to say industries), who need LOTS of cheap energy in order to be able to be competitive in international export markets.
On 28 September 2022, I already headlined and explained “How America Is Crushing Europe”, which opened:
America creates, imposes, and enforces the sanctions against Russia, which are forcing up energy-prices in Europe, and are thereby driving Europe’s corporations to move to America, where taxes, safety-and-environmental regulations, and the rights of labor, are far lower, and so profits will be far higher for the investors.
Furthermore, America can supply its own energy.
Therefore, supply-chains are less dicey in the U.S. than in Europe. There is less and less reason now for a firm to be doing anything in Europe except selling to Europeans, who are becoming increasingly desperate to get whatever they can afford to buy, now that Russia, which had been providing the lowest-cost energy and other commodities, is being strangled out of European markets, by the sanctions. Money can move even when its owner can’t.
The European public will now be left farther and farther behind as Europe’s wealth flees — mainly to America (whose Government had created this capital-flight of Europe’s wealth).
And on 24 June 2023, I headlined “Now the Pay-off Comes from Blowing Up the Nord Stream Pipeline” and reported
The losers in all of this are, of course, the people of Germany — and also of other European countries that had been buying the extra-cheap Russian pipelined gas — who will now be paying Americans a much higher price than previously they had been paying Russians. Not only will Germans and other Europeans now be paying for the super-chilled canned and cross-Atlantic shipped gas [LNG] that previously was simply pipelined, but Europeans will now have lost what little sovereign independence they had formerly had when the U.S. Government allowed them to buy their gas and oil from Russia.
Perhaps they will be learning the hard way that it’s no fun to be a vassal nation.
For example: slide 2 of the 9 November 2017 “US LNG vs Russian pipe gas: impact on prices”, by Dr. Thierry Bros of the Oxford University Institute for Energy Studies, states that Russian gas is the least costly, US LNG can’t compete with it on price, Nord Stream 1 (NS 2 hadn’t yet been approved) is cheaper than gas piped through Ukraine, and Nord Stream 2 (once operational) will be cheaper than gas piped through Ukraine.
Slide 6 shows that the ”Full cost of US LNG” is more than twice the “Henry Hub” (or “HH”) gas price.
A CSIS (Pentagon think tank) blog post on 5 July 2019 was headlined “How Much Does U.S. LNG Cost in Europe?” and asked the “familiar question: Can U.S. LNG compete with Russian gas in Europe?” but conspicuously refused to answer it.
A 25 March 2021 German study concluded that Russia outcompeted America even on LNG supplied in Europe: “LNG exports from Qatar and Russia are relatively competitive in Western Europe,” and even under the best of circumstances, “U.S. LNG only displaces small volumes from other LNG suppliers in Western Europe.”
Germans will be paying the extra price for this, for at least 20 years.
One of the reader-comments to the FT article said “ German companies pay 4 times more for gas than US competitors. As Draghi’s paper states, this needs to be addressed. Nordstream was cheap and reliable relative to western LNG. Have you read the Draghi paper? Germany is set to send 12 billion euros to Ukr next year. Do you think there are no higher priorities for these funds for German citizens and industry?” Clearly, a German treaty of peace and mutually beneficial trade with Russia would do vastly more for Germay’s national security and economy than would Gemany’s present plan for re-armament and war against Russia. But that’s an option which would would be prohibited to discuss in the media of Germany as continuing to be a colony of the U.S. empire.
Another reader-comment to that article was:
Not a single mention of Germany shooting itself in the foot with Energiewende and a disastrous energy policy.
Missing the elephant in the room.
A realistic portrayal of the outlook for Germany’s economy going forward is the following from Alexander Mercouris:
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https://theduran.com/germany-unstoppable-industrial-decline/
“Germany unstoppable industrial decline”
16 November 2025, Alexander Mercouris
RELATED:
On November 16th, Reuters headlined “Exclusive: Ahead of Hasina court verdict, son warns of Bangladesh violence if party ban stays” and reported that Bangladesh is set for mass violence unless its former leading Party, the Awami League, is relegalized there, but Reuters hid the fact that on 5 August 2023 a ‘student-led’ (that’s what Reuters called it) but actually U.S.-planned and led, coup, by USAID, NED, and IRI, overthrew and replaced that Party, and imposed the current ruling regime there. The imperial regime’s media do not report the imperial regime’s operations. The wool is systematically pulled over virtually everyone’s eyes and ears; and to report the actual history is called just a “conspiracy theory” — not called reporting of the conspiracy-facts (such as those links lead the reader to).
This article was originally published on Eric’s Substack.
