Looking Back on the Year and Forum Outlook for 2023

What a year! A war against Ukraine, millions of people fleeing in Europe. Inflation of no less than ten percent. And for months we worried about whether we would still be able to heat our homes in the winter. Anyone who claims that he or she had even the slightest inkling of this is a charlatan – even if the longer such crises last, the more charlatans there seem to be who are celebrated as clairvoyants. Just to remind you: even the good old German Bundesbank did not see anything like a ten percent inflation coming – not even a three percent one (even if representatives of the holy authority like to try to suggest the opposite from time to time).

In addition to all the immediate suffering they bring, such crises also contribute to politicians spending many months primarily on day-to-day crisis management – instead of bringing about great visions and long-term changes. One might think so. And there is certainly something to that. On the other hand, one could also draw the conclusion from the year 2022 that crises can accelerate a new way of thinking that would be inconceivable in normal times.

Without the Corona, war and energy price shocks, it might have taken forever for the realization to take hold in Germany that there are major challenges whose solutions require debt-financed investments – as was developed in studies for our Forum by economists such as Tom Krebs, Patrick Graichen and Philippa Sigl-Glöckner.

Without the energy price shock, it would have been hard to imagine that the market-liberal dictum of the supposedly always efficient markets would have tipped over into something much more realistic – and suddenly, thanks to Isabella Weber and Sebastian Dullien, there was also serious consideration of how and when the state should intervene and (de facto) set price limits. Just as has now been done with the gas price brake. A breakthrough. A paradigm shift on the way to a new economy.

Because the crisis has also shaken the German economic model to the core, we will address this issue at our next major workshop in May: the question of what an export model looks like that no longer relies solely on economic laws, but prevents dangerous geopolitical dependencies from arising in the first place. Or what a transformation to climate neutrality, accelerated by the energy crisis, could look like for the German economy. And whether a new paradigm is needed to fight inflation – when this inflation is so strongly driven by supply factors such as energy prices, which a central bank can only influence very indirectly. Working title: Resetting the Economy after Corona and the Energy Shock.

More on the date, location and top speakers soon.

What is already certain is that on January 17 at 5 p.m. Rana Fohoraar from the Financial Times will present her new book “Homecoming” in our next New Economy Short Cut – commented by the head of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Holger Görg. Sign up here.

A few days before we will also publish our big report on the state of the paradigm shift in economics and politics. More about that here as well.

Until then, we wish you all a merry Christmas,

Thomas Fricke and the Forum Team

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