Ldear reader, the purchase prices for land and houses have been rising sharply for years, and this year the interest on mortgage lending has also tripled. A mixture that put an end to many house dreams. But for a few weeks now there has been growing hope that something will still work. Mortgage rates, meanwhile, have fallen well below their June peak and studies are now mounting that house prices have fallen this year. But Dyrk Scherff, editor in the “Value” department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper, took a closer look. Prices would have to fall much more sharply to compensate for the rise in interest rates. This is shown by a small sample invoice for a house with a current purchase price of 700,000 euros, co-financed with 100,000 euros of your own money. If the price falls by five percent (and thus more than so far this year), the house purchase project will still be more expensive if interest rates have already risen by 0.5 percentage points. If the house price falls by ten percent, it will be cheaper overall. However, if the interest rate rises by one percentage point in this case, the total costs will increase again. So what to do?
Either way, Germany is facing a bad time, when energy is scarce and expensive and when economic output will shrink. There has been no doubt about this forecast at least since the gas supply stop for the Nord Stream 1 pipeline. In its autumn forecast, the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW) forecast that economic output in 2023 would fall by 0.7 percent compared to this year. But how exactly does this downturn come about? And how are the different areas of the economy connected? Johannes Pennekamp from our business editorial team prepared the connections. His text is about exports, investments, money that has to be spent on energy, the state and its (bubbling) tax revenues, the labor market and the fact that the situation is anything but hopeless – despite everything.
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Because one shouldn’t exaggerate with everyone either, although exaggeration has become the standard in social debate. Jürgen Kaube has dealt with this change, with Karl May, gender, the frequency of the word “incomprehensible” on the Internet. The structural change in the public sphere, which was triggered by the Internet and platforms, is perhaps not political at all. It leads back to the debates about what may or must be said. After all, once everyone has become an author, the situation can easily arise in which everyone copies the weakest characteristics of journalism, namely those that one can also realize on one’s own initiative. But: “The sayings don’t evaporate in the electronic pub. It repeats what has already been said a hundred times, and for that very reason it has to be said louder and louder. The fights are shifted into the speech acts, and it is easier to fight with words. There is no possibility of communicating weariness through silence. Also, there is no beer to go back to when the discussion has run its course. There is only exhaustion from them.”
Have a good rest at the weekend! Thank you for your interest in our digital offers. If you have any questions about your F+ subscription, please write to me: c.knop@faz.de,
Yours, Carsten Knop
editor
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
