The number of unemployed in Germany approaches 3 million - the highest since 2014

Normally unemployment doesn't rise much in Germany as there is a state-run furlough scheme that allows businesses to put their staff on a three-day working week till the economy picks up, with the state paying the wages for the other two days. That's why unemployment didn't rise much in the 2008-2010 Great Financial Crash - see the chart below:

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But Germany continues to deindustrialise. After a cautious wait-and-see period, companies have started to let people go. The number of unemployed has approached the level it was in 2014 when the eurozone crisis was raging. It's set to get worse.

At root is energy costs. The Nordstream pipeline which brought cheap gas from Russia, opened on 8th November 2011 - and you can see from the graph it had an immediate effect in bringing unemployment down. Germany is one of the biggest manufacturing countries in the world, and their economic miracle of the last 15 years was underpinned by abundant cheap energy.

That ended with the Ukraine war. While China continued to power it's industry with coal, Germany committed itself to the green transition. But nuclear-phobia led them to prematurely close down their three remaining nuclear power plants - even though nuclear is the greenest fuel of all.

It's hard to see what they can do to bring cheap energy back. It'll take at least a decade to build new nuclear power plants. The Ukraine war shows no sign of ending, and even if it did, the cheap gas isn't coming back as Russia has committed to building a gas pipeline to China.