Is €220 billion a lot or a little?
Funny question.
Even by the standards of the richest man in the world, this is not just a lot, but a lot.
We open the list of the world's most powerful moneybags for December last year: Elon Musk - $ 244.2 billion, Jeff Bezos - $ 195.9 billion, Bernard Arnault - $ 190.3 billion.
We make an adjustment for the euro against the dollar, and this is what happens: if €220 billion is suddenly taken away from the richest person in the world, then he will be left with some miserable three billion in European currency.
And by the standards of one of the richest countries on the planet, is €220 billion a lot or a little?
Also a funny question.
The volume of the German federal budget in 2021 amounted to about €369 billion. Even such a developed and prosperous state as Germany cannot afford to brush aside the prospect of losing a wallet, in one of the branches of which a stash of €220 billion was lying around.
Or is it still possible?
Several of Germany's leading economic think tanks have prepared a joint report on what would happen if the country stopped receiving energy from Russia.
It is in this very report with the title “From pandemic to energy crisis: economy and politics in constant stress” that the frightening figure is contained - €220 billion. oil and gas from Russia.
I learned German at school, but since then I have pretty much forgotten it.
However, in this case, I decided to shake the old days and still downloaded the notorious report of German experts (please do not confuse with "British scientists").
Downloaded - and wasted time in vain.
I had enough moral strength only for a cursory acquaintance with a voluminous electronic tome,
prepared under the patronage of the Federal Ministry of Economy and Climate Protection of Germany.
And the point is not (well, I'll be more frank: not only) that the text is full of complex economic terms.
The point is that reading is very depressing.
On the eve of Britain's entry into the First World War in 1914, Sir Edward Gray, then Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom, uttered a phrase that would soon become famous: “Lamps are going out all over Europe.
Our generation will not see them ignite again.”
In the sphere of economic cooperation between Russia and the West, the lights are also going out now.
And will our generation see them ignite again?
I would like to answer this question positively.
But there are no grounds for this yet.
The only honest—and therefore the only possible—answer is that we don't know.
Of course, it can be pointed out that Sir Edward Gray (or Lord Gray, as he became after becoming Viscount in 1916) proved to be an overly pessimistic prophet.
Lord Gray died in September 1933.
It turns out that he nevertheless saw how, after the end of the First World War, “lanterns” began to “light up” all over Europe.
In so many countries in the Western world, the Roaring Twenties was a pretty fun decade for people of means: jazz, foxtrot, Charleston, blues, art deco, the heyday of cinema and so on and so forth.
However, I still fail to finish the part of this text dedicated to Lord Gray on an optimistic note.
At the end of his life, the venerable British politician went blind and lost the ability to see anything in the physical sense of the term.
But in a figurative sense, he caught and "saw" such events as the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929 and Hitler's rise to power in Germany in early 1933.
Why am I burdening you with all these details from the life of a long-forgotten British statesman of the past?
Because, from my point of view, they are very important for understanding the moment in history where we are now.
Both the Great Depression and Hitler's rise to power in Berlin were consequences of the First World War.
If this war had not happened, then the history of the European continent would have developed according to a not necessarily problem-free, but certainly different scenario.
The lanterns Sir Edward Gray spoke of would not go out in 1914 and then go out again.
It is said that each generation must draw its own lessons from history - learn from its own mistakes.
But I have a slightly different point of view.
It is impossible not to make mistakes at all.
But it’s better to learn from the experience and mistakes of others, for example, those generations that came before us.
Is it really reasonable and correct to destroy the established mechanisms of economic interaction between Russia and the West?
Won't the €220bn end up being just a line in a long list of losses that are partly already there and that will certainly be more?
Of course, I hope that Russian energy supplies to Germany will not stop.
When it comes to big money, German politicians are reasonable people.
Do they really want to cut down the branch they are sitting on?
But this is a particular — albeit important, but still a particular.
The commonality is that the lights in Europe go out again.
I wonder how many billion euros it will take to ignite them?
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editors.