“In view of the ongoing industrial recession, job cuts in German industry are accelerating: the number of employees as of June 30th of this year was 2.1 percent lower than twelve months earlier. Within a year, around 114,000 jobs were cut in German industry. Since the pre-pandemic year of 2019, the bottom line is that the number of employees has shrunk by almost –250,000, a decline of 4.3 percent.”
This is an automatic translation of a paragraph from an EY report on Germany’s car industry from late August. CNBC covered it here. I’m now going to do something uncharacteristic and let the numbers speak for themselves. In no particular order:
18.03.2025: Audi cuts 7,500 jobs; remains committed to German sites
04.06. 2025: Nearly 20,000 Volkswagen workers take voluntary redundancy while others could work a 4-day week amid overhaul
03.06.2025: Deutsche Post to slash 8,000 jobs
15.09.2025: Job cuts loom as Germany's Bosch aims to save billions by 2030
08.07.2025: Daimler Truck plans to cut around 5,000 jobs in Germany
18.02. 2025: Continental: German auto parts giant cuts thousands of jobs (3,000 globally, more than half in Germany)
26.08.2025: German car industry sheds 51,500 jobs in a year
16.09.2025: Ford Slashes 1,000 Jobs in Germany As EV Sales Slow
09.01.2025: Germany records highest company insolvencies since financial crisis
08.05. 2025: Germany sees highest spike in bankruptcies in 20 years
26.06.2025: Germany sees highest corporate bankruptcy rate in a decade: report
I leave you with this chart of German electricity prices on the spot market.
Et tu Britannia. Someone described Great Britain as an island floating in a sea of oil with its basement full of coal and gas.
The SDP is a small fringe Party in the UK, whose leader has summed up the state of affairs nicely. It’s a close race to total ruin between the UK and Germany.
“For decades, Britain has sleepwalked into an abyss which has made us poorer, weaker, and gutted our industrial base. The heart of this is a self-induced energy crisis which has been catastrophic for our welfare and security. Britons now suffer the highest energy prices in the developed world, with our collective wealth continually drained to fund vast energy imports.
How did Britain—an energy rich nation—sink into an energy crisis? We argue below that the causes were part indifference, part profiteering and part lunacy. And it happened because of pretence: an ill-fated attempt to ignore the material world. But as we are finding out, the material world matters, production matters, and tangible needs matter.”
But hey, they have lots of renewables, they have lots of renewables!!
PS - Shhhhhh.. that they only work part time and have destroyed the German economy should not be spoken…