Peanut Rage

If there is anything that Germans get more excited about than football, it is scenting a suitable scandal to rant about. To rate a scandal as rant-grade they have set the bar pretty low meanwhile: “Skandal!” must be one of the most often (ab)used words in German newspaper headlines.

God bless the G7 summit, then: it provided the righteous with the perfect opportunity to get their neck veins pulsing. Sniffing here and there for an angle, they finally homed in on the cost of the summit. But now that the word “billions” is about to be elbowed away by “trillion” in any discussion involving money, the actual sum did not appear impressive enough, so a diligent soul set out to convert it into something more enraging. And voilà, so was born the “90 thousand euros per minute!” bugbear that is driving summit opponents to a paroxysm.

Do they have a point? Is this really a big sum? Let’s see.

Looking around the world, US military spending is juicy enough to deserve a peek. At 637 billion dollars a year, or 564 billion euros, it translates into about 1,073,000 euros for every minute of an entire year. (And it has come down. It used to be quite a bit more, at the peak of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.)

Turning home, Germany has a public debt of about 2.048 trillion euros. Assuming a very modest average interest rate of only 0.5% per year, Germany pays 19,484 euros per minute just on interest. Every minute, every day, every year.

Or take public help to Greece. The international community has given Greece 324,5 billion euros in public credit since 2010. That translates into propping up the Greek economy to the tune of 123,668 euros each minute of every year, for five years in a row.

The credit provided to Greece by Germany alone, in turn, amounts to around 85 billion euros so far. That comes to 32,344 euros per minute, five years long. Take that, Yanis.

Or, coming down to earth, advertising at prime time at ZDF, one of the two public TV channels in Germany, comes at 1,524 euros. Per second. Scaled up to a minute, that means 91,440 euros, a figure strikingly close to the 90,000 euros per minute for the G7 summit. But the ZDF advertising is for one single time, on one channel, on one day, and only visible in Germany and maybe a couple of surrounding places. The G7 coverage, in contrast, was constant over two whole days over every channel imaginable. And it was seen around the world.

On top of that, an ad on ZDF might move you to switch to a different kind of double-glazed window panes. The G7 moved countries to change their stand regarding planet-threatening global warming.

At 90,000 euros per minute, then, such German-image-enhancing global, multilingual publicity was actually a bargain. Get real, folks.