The European Union is positioning itself to be completely cut off from all Russian energy. And if that happens, Germany and other heavily import-reliant countries in Europe will suffer a Lehman Brothers-type collapse of its energy market.
Economic Minister and Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck issued a stark warning about how Europe’s largest economy faces total economic destruction should gas supplies run thin this winter, which they are expected to do.
“Companies would have to stop production, lay off their workers, supply chains would collapse, people would go into debt to pay their heating bills, that people would become poorer,” he is quoted as saying.
The Green Party politician actually described what is soon to come as “a king of Lehman Brothers effect in the energy market,” which would quickly spread like a contagion or virus throughout municipal utilities and both the industrial and commercial sectors of the economy.
“And then you have a domino effect that would lead to a severe recession,” he added.
Lehman Brothers, as you may recall, was the lynchpin of the 2008 global financial crisis, which sent Wall Street tumbling until the government decided that taxpayers needed to bail out the culprits whose greed and corruption caused the crisis in the first place.
“The impact of Lehman’s collapse was particularly widespread due to the interconnectedness of its balance sheets with other banks, insurance companies, hedge funds, and other financial institutions,” explains Breitbart News.
“Many believe that the U.S. government made a critical mistake in allowing Lehman to fail and that the failure worsened the crisis and subsequent economic calamity.”
The West is committing economic suicide while blaming Putin for it
Germany already faces a 60 percent reduction in natural gas from Russia, all because it refuses to pay for the energy in rubles demanded by Russia.
Had Germany and other Western powerhouses not imposed crippling economic sanctions against Russia over its “special operation” in Ukraine, Russia never would have changed the requirement that the West pays for gas in rubles – so the West only has itself to blame for what is now unfolding.
Instead of fixing the problem that they helped create, politicians in Germany are calling on the German people to pay for it by drastically reducing their energy consumption.
Germans are now expected to live within a model of extreme scarcity to cover for the failed economic policies of their elected leaders.
“Everyone in industry and in their home life can contribute to this – and yes, this also includes jumpers, shower heads, turning the heating down a bit, all of this helps,” Habeck says.
If Germans refuse to do this, then they will simply have to pay double or triple the cost of energy in the coming months, which will be absolutely devastating once winter arrives.
Should Russian energy stop flowing completely, then Germany will have less than three months of fuel left before a total collapse, warned Klaus Müller, head of the Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur) energy regulator.
“If the storage facilities in Germany were mathematically 100 percent full … we could do without Russian gas completely … for just about two-and-a-half months and then the storage tanks will be empty,” he is quoted as saying.
Germany was repeatedly warned in the past that its over-reliance on Russian energy could cause problems. Those problems are now emerging at a rapid pace and they threaten to destroy Europe’s largest economy in a matter of months.
Germany also could have avoided going “green,” which would have allowed it to become more energy independent. Instead, it opted to close its nuclear power plants, phase out coal, and hope for the best with just wind turbines and solar panels.
The latest news about the energy crisis and what is soon to come as a result of it can be found at Collapse.news.
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