Germany’s (and the EU’s) Economic Suicide

29 June 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

Ever since the U.S. Government placed intensified primary and secondary economic sanctions against Germany’s biggest — and by far cheapest — fuels-source, Russia, in 2022, Germany’s economy, which had been the best-performing one in the EU, started declining, because of the soaring fuel prices that resulted from the German Government’s compliance with the secondary sanctions (the penalties that the U.S. Government would have imposed against Germany if Germany had violated America’s primary sanctions against Russia).

Now, three years later, on Thursday 26 June 2025, Reuters has headlined “German corporate insolvencies at highest level in a decade, study shows”, and reported: “Corporate bankruptcies in Germany were at their highest level in a decade in the first half of 2025, as firms in Europe's largest economy struggle with weak demand, rising costs and uncertainty, a study by economic tracking agency Creditreform showed on Thursday. Some 11,900 corporate insolvencies were registered in the first six months of this year, 9.4% more than in the same period last year, the agency said. ‘Germany remains in a deep economic and structural crisis,’ said Creditreform chief economist Patrik-Ludwig Hantzsch’ . … ‘The persistently high level of insolvencies is increasingly triggering chain reactions’. … Germany's federal statistics office reported final first-quarter insolvency figures earlier this month that showed corporate insolvencies rose by 13.1%.”

This is an enormous danger not only to Germany’s economy, but to the Government itself. Alexander Mercouris, whose record as an economic prognosticator is extraordinarily good, said on June 29th that “Confidence in Germany's fiscal rectitude, I suspect, is going to start to melt away. Some people are saying that within 5 years, Germany is going to have a debt to GDP ratio above 100%. I don’t think it's going to take 5 years — two three at the most, that’s my guess.” Currently, it is only 62.5%. A rise to 100% within only three years would be astounding. But it would be needed in order for the Government to continue to provide essential health, welfare, and educational services, to increasing numbers of unemployed, sick and needy, citizens, while there are decreasing tax-revenues being received from that deteriorating national population.

Already on 28 September 2022, I had headlined “How America Is Crushing Europe” and opened:

America creates, imposes, and enforces the sanctions against Russia, which are forcing up energy-prices in Europe, and are thereby driving Europe’s corporations to move to America, where taxes, safety-and-environmental regulations, and the rights of labor, are far lower, and so profits will be far higher for the investors.

Furthermore, America can supply its own energy.

Therefore, supply-chains are less dicey in the U.S. than in Europe. There is less and less reason now for a firm to be doing anything in Europe except selling to Europeans, who are becoming increasingly desperate to get whatever they can afford to buy, now that Russia, which had been providing the lowest-cost energy and other commodities, is being strangled out of European markets, by the sanctions. Money can move even when its owner can’t.

The European public will now be left farther and farther behind as Europe’s wealth flees — mainly to America (whose Government had created this capital-flight of Europe’s wealth).

Europe’s leaders have cooperated with America’s leaders, to cause this European decline (by joining, instead of rejecting, America’s sanctions against Russia), but Germany’s companies can also enjoy significant benefits from relocating or expanding in America. Germany’s business daily newspaper, Handlelsblatt, reported, on September 25th, “More and more German companies are expanding their locations in North America: Washington attracts German companies with cheap energy and low taxes. This applies above all to the southern states. Berlin is alarmed – and wants to take countermeasures.”

On 23 June 2023, I headlined “Now the Pay-off Comes from Blowing Up the Nord Stream Pipeline”, and opened:

On June 23, Jamison Cocklin headlined at Natural Gas Intelligence, “Venture Global Set to Become Germany’s Biggest Long-Term LNG Supplier” and reported: “Venture Global LNG Inc. has agreed to supply a state-owned German company with the super-chilled fuel for two decades as European offtakers continue to line up deals to replace Russian natural gas imports.” Upstream Energy simply bannered “Venture Global set to become Germany’s largest LNG supplier”. It’s a very big deal.

This is the culmination of an agreement that was signed just a year earlier. As Cocklin had bannered on 6 October 2022, “Germany’s EnBW to Buy More Venture Global LNG in Ongoing Shift from Russia”. At that time, he reported that, “Venture Global LNG Inc. said Thursday German utility EnBW AG would expand the amount of LNG it would take under a 20-year sales and purchase agreement (SPA) signed in June.” So: the basic agreement had been signed in June 2022.

Here is what is now known about the price that will be paid for that “amount of LNG”: Nothing. However, something is known about the history of this deal:

On 22 June 2023, Venture Global headlined “Venture Global and SEFE Announce 20-year LNG Sales and Purchase Agreement. Venture Global set to become Germany’s largest LNG supplier, with a combined 4.25MTPA of 20-year offtake agreements signed. Approximately half of CP2 20MTPA nameplate capacity has been sold, with 1/3 of the contracted capacity committed to German customers. Construction expected to begin in 2023.”

As-of yet, no one has indicated what the delivered price of product to Germany will be under this contract, nor what the price to Germany had been of the Russian pipelined gas that it will now be replacing. Of course, only on that basis can the net annual added cost to Germany, that will end up being paid by Germans, under this historic contract, be calculated.

Whatever it will turn out to be, the June 22 announcement gives good indication that the biggest payoff from blowing up the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines from Russia to Germany will end up in American hands.

Venture Global Partners was founded on 30 July 2008, by Robert Pender and Mike Sabel. In 2010, they established Venture Capital Partners, and then they announced in 2013, that their “development strategy is to be a long-term, low cost producer of LNG Working with a global LNG technology vendor.” They received venture-capital funding of $125M in 2015, then in February 2021 $500M debt-funding from Morgan Stanley, Mizuho Capital, Bank of America, and JP Morgan, and then in January 2023, an additional loan of $1B from an unspecified source.

The losers in all of this are, of course, the people of Germany — and also of other European countries that had been buying the extra-cheap Russian pipelined gas. …

As regards the pretext that the U.S. Government and its colonies had used in order to ‘justify’ the primary sanctions against Russia, I had deadlined on 25 February 2022, “The Real History Behind Ukraine, Putin, the EU, Gas, & Donbass” and opened:

Russia’s long-predicted invasion of Ukraine finally happened, but the reasons for it are widely misrepresented. Basic history is necessary in order to understand it.

The Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline, from Russia, under the Baltic Sea, to Germany, was planned in order to enable greatly increased sales-volume of the lowest-cost natural gas, which came from Russia, into the EU, without having to rely upon the irregular pipelined supplies through the unstable and unpredictable nation of Ukraine. In fact, the planning-document noted on its page 12 that “Import of Russian natural gas to Europe takes place through three main routes, whereof 80% of the gas is in transit through the Ukraine.” They didn’t need to say that that was unstable; everyone knew it was; so, diplomatically speaking, this unfortunate fact about Ukraine wasn’t mentioned by them in the document, though the fact was a crucial reason for the Nord Stream project, which would transmit gas directly from Russia to Germany, no longer through unstable Ukraine.

On 8 November 2011, the BBC headlined “Nord Stream gas pipeline opened by Merkel and Medvedev”, and Russia’s RIA Novosty presented this happy photo of the signing-ceremony:

From left to right, Gerhard Schroder had been Germany’s Chancellor; Francois Fillon had been France’s Prime Minister; Johannes Teyssen was the CEO of multinational German electrical utility E.ON; Angela Merkel was Germany’s Chancellor; Mark Rutte was Prime Minister of Netherlands; Dmitry Medvedev was Prime Minister of Russia; Alexey Miller was Chairman of Russia’s Gazprom; Guenter Oettinger was the European Commission’s V.P. in charge of Energy; Kurt Bock was CEO of Germany’s BASF; and Erwin Sellering was Germany’s Minister President of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

None of those people are or had been pro-Nazi. However, ideological anti-Russian racist-fascists (or nazis) dominated in Ukraine’s far-western provinces, near to Poland, of Lviv, Tarnopil, Volyn, and Ivano-Frankivsk; and, so, there was, in Ukraine, intense nationalistic and nazi opposition to replacing Ukraine as the main transit-route for the crucial commodity of natural gas, from Russia into the EU, which new pipeline into the EU would greatly reduce the gas-transit-fees that were being paid by Russia into Ukraine’s Government — and reduce the geostrategic importance of their country (something that nazis tend to be very concerned with, since they’re supremacist-nationalists, not merely supremacist-racists). This proposed pipeline (which had been pressed upon Merkel by leaders of German industry, who needed cheaper energy) was viewed by those far-right Ukrainians as being an anti-Ukraine Russian scheme, even though Nord Stream was actually planned simply as a necessary business-deal between Germany and Russia. That’s what it actually was. And it also enjoyed considerable support elsewhere in the EU, such as in Netherlands, and France.

U.S. President Barack Obama intended even when he entered office in 2009, to replace Syria’s Government, but his decision to replace Ukraine’s Government didn’t come right away. On 12 April 2010, Ukraine’s democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych met the democratically elected U.S. President at the White House, to which Obama had invited him, but Yanukovych refused Obama’s suggestions that Ukraine join America’s alliance against Ukraine’s next-door neighbor Russia. (Obama wanted to take over Russia’s main naval base, which since 1783 has been in Crimea, which the Soviet dictator had transferred to Ukraine in 1954, so it was then in Ukraine — Obama was planning for that Russian naval base in Ukraine to become another U.S. naval base, and for Ukraine to be brought into NATO. But Yanukovych said no.) On 2 July 2010, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Yanukovych held a joint press conference in Kiev, where she said that she had discussed with Yanukovych joint military exercises with U.S. forces against his neighbor, Russia. Yanukovych again declined the demands. Obama then assigned Victoria Nuland, Hillary’s friend (and the wife of the famous neoconservative — or American-imperialist — writer, Robert Kagan) to organize a coup against Ukraine, to place it under U.S. control. Planning for the coup was already under way by no later than 23 June 2011, which was even before the Nord Stream project had yet become signed. But after Nord Stream became agreed later in 2011, that proposed pipeline was immediately added to the Ukrainian-takeover target, as something that needed to be cancelled. (Ukraine’s gas-transit fees were crucial financial support to Ukraine’s government, and Obama wanted those fees to be supporting a post-coup Americanized Ukraine.) As CNBC accurately summarized on 11 July 2018: “President Barack Obama opposed Nord Stream 2 and President George W. Bush came out against the original Nord Stream prior to its completion in 2011. Like the central and eastern European countries, they worried it increased Russian influence over the Continent.” Post-WW-II American Presidents wanted America to control Europe, as key allies to conquer Russia. The Nord Stream project was, to a large extent, a European bid to work cooperatively with Russia and finally free itself of U.S. domination over European countries.

Nuland got caught managing the coup when on 4 February 2014 a phone call from her to the U.S. Ambassador in Kiev got posted to youtube in which she instructed him to get “Yats” or “Yatsenyuk” appointed to run the post-coup government, and “Yats” was a rabidly anti-Russian and pro-nazi politician, who, unlike some others that the U.S. regime had been considering for the purpose, didn’t yet have any clear or blatantly expressed racist-fascist sentiments (which would have meant bad PR), but who, once he did become appointed on 22 February 2014 to run the government, promptly replaced the generals with ones who favored exterminating enough people in the heavily pro-Yanukovych areas of Ukraine so that, in subsequent Ukrainian national elections, rabid anti-Russians like “Yats” would be able to become ‘democratically elected’ to lead the country. The objective wasn’t only to kill enough of those pro-Russian voters but even more importantly to scare enough of the residents there to escape to Russia, so that they’d be gone altogether from Ukraine’s voting-rolls (either by fleeing or by having been killed). Videos became posted online of some of the Obama-instigated local Ukrainian extermination-and terrorism operations, such as in Odessa, and in Donbass, and, of course, in Crimea, but those were basically covered-up and/or lied-about in the ’news’-media of the U.S.-and-allied (which included EU) regimes, because Obama needed those allies to agree with the U.S. regime’s anti-Russia sanctions, so as to block the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from being allowed to operate (which would strengthen not only Russia but Europe). This wasn’t merely in order to weaken the economies in Germany and throughout the EU and make them more dependent upon the U.S.; it was also in order to replace Europe’s low-priced Russian pipelined natural gas with America’s costly tanked-and-shipped expensive liquefied natural gas, so as to enrich America’s billionaires who financed America’s successful politicians. It was to force Europe to pay America’s prices.

As a result of the success of Obama and Trump and Biden — and of Congress-members of both of America’s two political Parties (this bipartisan effort) — the inexpensive Russian pipelined natural gas has, indeed, become replaced by the incredibly expensive canned American liquefied and cross-Atlantic-shipped natural gas, so as to weaken European industries, in the name of ‘protecting Ukraine’s democracy’, and this con-game strengthens the U.S., at Europe’s expense, and keeps Europe in its place as a U.S. vassal-region, which has consistently been ever since the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union. U.S. gas producers are laughing all the way to the bank, while blaming ‘the aggressive dictator” or “tyrant’, Putin, who is condemned by both America’s Republicans and Democrats. (Both of America’s Parties are nearly 100% neoconservative.)

On 17 February 2022, a retired head of Britain’s MI6, Sir John Sawers, was interviewed by NATO’s PR firm the Atlantic Council, and he seconded Nuland’s phone-call assertion that the U.N should “glue this thing”, when he used the phrase in a different context, saying that “If you try to install a new government which has no legitimacy, you’ve got to glue it in place.” She had said:

“Nuland: Ok. He’s now gotten both Serry and Ban ki-Moon to agree that Serry could come in Monday or Tuesday. That would be great, I think, to help glue this thing, and to have the UN help glue it, and, you know, fuck the EU.”

The last three words there, “fuck the EU,” were the only part of the entire phone call that the ‘news’-media in The West publicized; and, of course, The West’s widely deceived audiences had no idea, no way of knowing, what she was actually talking about, or why.

That is some of the deep history, or explanatory history, behind Germany’s — and Europe’s — economic decline. Almost all European nations have chosen to continue being colonies of the U.S. Government, instead of cooperators with the largest of all European countries, Russia, though Russia is on the same land-mass, and America is not, but is accessible only across 3,000 miles of ocean. The current failure of Europe is not due ONLY to the non-Russian part of Europe having paltry natural resources, but ALSO to the post-WW2 U.S. Government’s success at blocking Europe’s access to the world's most natural-resources-rich country, which is Russia. The recession or depression that non-Russian Europe is now experiencing is not natural, but has instead been engineered by America’s billionaires (who enormously benefit from it). Only by means of producing (and falsely explaining) the post-1991-Cold-War economic Iron Wall separating The West (including America) from The East (including both Russia and China) replacing the pre-1991 “Iron Curtain” (which Churchill and Truman had created against the Soviet Union) can America’s billionaires continue their Government’s immense wealth-extractions from Europe. Europe’s coming impoverishment is not natural but synthetic; what would be natural would be the great EurAsian Continent becoming the world-center that it naturally is (but was prevented from becoming, because U.S. president Truman decided on 25 July 1945 that it must not become, and that America must instead come to rule the entire world.

(NOTE: The 51 links are provided here so that instead of a reader’s having to go to a physical library in order to find and read books about a given linked-to allegation, one has only to click onto the link in order to see the evidence and find out more about that particular matter.)

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.