The stock exchanges were recently completely under the spell of American monetary policy.

In Germany, given the deteriorating economic situation, it was temporarily forgotten that many companies were still making very high profits.

The auditing and consulting company EY recently even announced that 2022 could be a record year for the Dax companies.

Christian Siedenbiedel

Editor in Business.

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Among other things, the good performance of the car manufacturers plays a role here, which at times concentrated on particularly profitable models in the face of supply bottlenecks.

Sales and profits in other sectors and regions could still cause a stir.

There has been a lot of discussion about the high profits in the energy sector - but food companies like Nestlé have apparently also been quite successful in passing on increased prices to customers.

And some banks benefited fairly well from the monetary policy of the ECB.

It wasn't as bad as feared

The stock market did not develop as badly in the past year as one might have thought given the war, inflation and fears of a recession.

The Dax had lost around 24 percent from the beginning of the year to the end of September.

From the end of September until now, however, it has increased again by 20 percent.

For the coming year, at least the analysts from Deutsche Bank and DZ Bank are anticipating a Dax of 15,000 points by the end of the year.

Compared to the current level of around 14,530 points on Friday, that would still be an increase of a good 3 percent - and not a collapse.

First signs of hope even with inflation

It should now be important that German companies do not invest primarily abroad in view of the excessively high energy prices.

Reliable framework conditions are likely to be required from the federal government.

Although the economy is clouding over, most analysts have verbally disarmed: There is now less talk of “de-industrialization” and more of a “slight recession”.

And it may have a smaller impact than previous downturns.

Given labor shortages for many skills, companies may prefer to “hoard” rather than “release” employees, as economists say.

There were even signs of hope this week with regard to the high level of inflation: the rates for Germany and for the euro area fell slightly.

Even if you couldn't have imagined earlier that people in Germany would be happy about an inflation rate of 10 percent.