The Hundred Days In Front Of Germany

 I sat last night and watched a short news piece.  Key feature?  Here was a typical German household, which had normally paid around 160 Euro a month for their natural gas system in the home.  

The new bill estimate from the provider?  In the 2,000 Euro range (monthly).

When asked how she could pay that....the response was....she couldn't.  

The provider probably would give her a warning by the 2nd month that she missed their 'goal'.  And by the third month, she'd be cut off.

All across German.....bills go out like this.

You see three things likely forming out of this:

1.  A whole bunch of Germans are going to marginally heat their homes this winter.  They might turn the natural gas furnace off entirely, and just run two or three electric heaters in the home.  

I stood in a hardware shop this week....which had a huge number of electric heaters up on shelves.  Some were the normal smaller sized units (for your bathroom), and some were mega-sized....the type you'd use in a work-shop situation (type that would consume 3,000 watts).  

The grid being able to handle a vast number of these situations?  No.  

2.  If a bunch of people quit natural gas providers....then some odd event would occur where the providers would be sitting on natural gas which wasn't moving.  Financially, they would be inviting a serious amount of chaos.....where people would refuse their product.  

3.  The government reacting and doing something immediately?  You don't get that impression.  There is a lot of talk, but it's like talking transmission repair issues with peanut-butter experts, or environmental folks.  

All of this snowballing into Christmas?  I see a massive collapse on gift purchases and normal holiday activity.  You could have a total collapse of the marketplace by the end of December in Germany.

Furniture shops and car sales collapsing?  If you don't have the money, you won't be spending it. 

So to my final comment....the next hundred days ought to be fairly interesting.  People will be doing things that they never dreamed of, and all this criticism of Covid....will be a joke compared to the new problem.