The Origins of the Wirecard Scandal
newrepublic.com
newrepublic.com
I feel the German inferiority complex described in the article. I think it is partly built on a misunderstanding: Silicon Valley was not funded by smart engineers thinking in their garages. It was funded by massive military grants. The garages came later. Last time Germany gave out massive military grants it was sadly very able to compete technologically. Everyone knows, who worked on the rockets that ultimatively won the space race.
German universities are indeed world-class. It's not like uneducated people can export this much. The university rankings do not take into account that research in Germany happens at Fraunhofer or Max Planck, which are door to door to their respective university and have shared staff. If all their papers would be taken into account, the rankings would change dramatically.
Germany is capable and cold start investing massively. I think the article exactly gets it: We are just too comfortable. Acting like a big Switzerland might not be glorious but in the end I take a socially relatively cohesive country, where an illness or going to university will not bankrupt you, where your kids can travel alone in public transportation, where police shootings per year are single digits, where the air is very breathable and the tap water is drinkable over world leadership any time.
We can always pump some billions into football or another sport once in a while and watch the nation win the world cup, if we really need to dominate something for no good reason, which is an obvious connection to national pride, the article missed out on.
The universities are other funny thing. They have no future with heavily underpaid staff and work contracts for 6-12 month working contracts. Max Planck and Fraunhofer are sweatshops for industrial partners. They do the tasks for industry at 40% costs, again 1 year contracts and sad salary.
I don’t want to start about general technical level in Germany. I want to cry when I think about coming relocation and registering whole family in another city. Plus car. Plus another school. It’s all filing tens of pages and using snail mail or showing up in person. Or using fax machine as a modern solution.
Why was the pandemic management a real shitshow?
Also weekly meetings changing (symbolic) measures, making everyone tired of the whole show.
Do you mean they have the vaccine but can't give it to people? I thought we did not secure enough of them.
> Also weekly meetings changing (symbolic) measures,
Yeah, that is not good.
You call that "a real shit show"?
Edit: Oh nevermind. You where not the person I asked. Sorry.
All of the above. Finally they are just giving it to doctors and now numbers are finally ramping up. Leave us some drinks at the opening party, Germany will be a few months late.
Sure, you can question the delays (which given the time between application and approval wasn't too different from the FDA)
Do you know how many vaccine was thrown away? https://www.sueddeutsche.de/gesundheit/impfstoff-coronavirus...
Let’s don’t start with Bavarian ffp2 masks while the rest of Germany can live without them.
[Quick background: Germany has a political system not entirely unlike the US with a federal level and "Länder" = state level. Health (along with police, education, etc.) is delegated to the Länder.]
Towards the end of 2020, two things happened:
People developed "Coronamüdigkeit" (being sick of the restrictions), and in the run-up to the federal election in Sept 2021 (with Merkel stepping down), several prime ministers of the Länder tried to gain a higher profile (with an eye on the Bundeskanzler election later) by opening up. So, squabbling and inconsistent policy ensued, with a massive third wave happening right now.
Throw in corruption (several CDU politicians had to step down because of shady mask deals), the delayed vaccination drive, etc., and "shitshow" seems appropriate.
People developed sickness of restrictions because the restrictions were not tight enough to completely stop the spread, but tight enough to become annoying when dragged along for so many months (a year?).
So this half-assed restriction policy were we're kind of, sort of, locked down, but not really, got people annoyed.
The problem is, even if you want to tighten the measures now to wipe out the virus, you can't, because people are already burned out from the previous half-assed measures trat dragged on for so long.
EDIT: Random examples: lockdown laws that fail trivial legal challenges because they were made up last minute. Almost religious clinging to the belief that kids in school aren't a relevant factor (to the point of states suppressing evidence to the contrary) which lead to too little investment into teaching infrastructure and options, making each switch between kids in schools and not unnecessary last minute and painful to implement. Unnecessarily messy signup/notification processes for vaccinations (who would have thought one might need a plan to vaccinate people at some point...). Late adjustment of financial help schemes. Nonsensical and inefficient schemes to e.g. distribute masks.
Wasted billions for pennies and killed thousands of people.
https://www.regierung.oberfranken.bayern.de/presse/pressemit...
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(oh and fitting, their government website does not seem to use a valid certificate )
https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.regierung...
If what's currently happening to Germany (uninterrupted boom since > 10 years) is decline, then let there be more of it.
It's great, that you are living in the moment, but I take a step back once in a while. The other side of the fence is probably not greener.
Germany is by no means perfect. Administration is a shit-show. But stuff is indeed improving (very slowly).
If by boom you mean the boom of big business profits that don't trickle down to the workers, boom of wealth inequality, asset prices, property prices and rents then yes, but that's nothing to be proud of.
Average wages of workers in Germany have not kept up with this boom but cost of living has risen.
I am not argueing that Germany is some kind of utopia. I am just saying: Find a better place to live. It will not be one of the dominant countries. It will be Switzerland etc.
Citation needed.
I would argue the point is actuallly the opposite: Capital gains taxes are actually lower than income taxes on your salary. Properties do have an unfair advantage, though, because they can be sold tax free after 10 years.
We do need something like a 401k. But if you read the election manifestos of different parties for September, they are indeed in there.
I will try to provide a screenshot from Steuerbescheinigung that Scalable Capital sent me a few days ago.
Also, if something like 401K (with matching, hehe) is really implemented one day in Germany, it will be a big step ahead. Right now people are constantly robbed with various corporate pension plans that just pour money into Allianz and other insurance companies for "only" 2% TER.
Here are 2 links that explain in detail [0] [1]. I'm sorry I misinformed you about Steuerbescheinigung - it's not visible there, but it is when you do Steuererklärung with smartsteuer.de.
[0] https://www.lohnsteuer-kompakt.de/fag/2020/2895/was_ist_die_...
[1] https://www.fondsclever.de/ratgeber/lexikon-investmentfonds/...
Just resorting to whataboutism at every step doesn't magically make rents in Germany cheaper more easy to obtain for those in Germany.
The fact that Parisians or Londoners or Tokyans(is that even a word?) have expensive rents doesn't help me when I live in Germany since they're completely different markets and I only compete in my local market, not with those in Paris/London/Tokyo.
Whataboutism is to use a different issue to show that the first issue is not that big, even though the second issue does not actually take away from the first issue and the first issue is worth discussing on its own.
What I am saying is: Rent in Germany is relatively inexpensive (even compared to income and especially compared to property prices). Because how do you determine if something is inexpensive? You compare it to something else. Comparing prices to determine if something is expensive is not whataboutism.
It is. But ... there are probably not many countries with better administration.
People have too high standards for leaders. They are also human.
I agree and this is really sad. Thinking of migrating because I plan to have a family and want them to grow up in the best environment. Which countries you guys think will be the best bet?
If you are a person of colour, even more reason to avoid the US. Not that Europe is perfect, but your chances of being shot by the police drop dramatically.
The real difference here is American issues are broadcasted more than European ones are.
There is no single country here where wages have increased faster than real-estate/cost of living and where the rich aren't getting richer while everyone else is stagnating at best.
It's a side effect of globalization and our current version of capitalism supported by (intentional) poorly designed economic policies that enable this wealth gap to grow ever larger.
Don't you (and your company) pay way more taxes in Germany than in Switzerland?
I've never applied to Munich positions but everything I've read point to a significant gap between Zürich and Munich in software engineering, even before taxes. But maybe that's only valid for software engineering and not so relevant for other engineering fields?
> I didn’t look at Zurich because of the crazy rental prices.
That's also where you have the highest salaries though... With the same reasoning nobody would work in the SV. And as soon as you start looking outside of the city center you quickly find cheaper accommodation.
But I think the main difference is really the taxes.
Yes you feel a decline because of the aging population and low business growth. I agree that a developing country will be more vibrant and you will feel more alive, but you will have to deal with a shit tons of other issues that are non existant in Germany.
I'm inclined to agree with the opinion upthread that Germany is maybe a bit overly negative about itself. :)
You're obviously entitled to your oppinion, but can we please stop pushing this cherry picked cliché narrative of "US bad because healthcare, shootings and tap water."? That's like saying Europe suffers from mass terrorist attacks and sexual assaults on young women.
>We can always pump some billions into football or another sport once in a while and watch the nation win the world cup, if we really need to dominate something for no good reason
Why not pump some billions in local unskilled wages and stricter enforcement of regulations so that foreign workers won't have to get exploited by unscrupulous German businesses?[1] That would be for an actual good reason IMHO.
[1]https://www.dw.com/en/germany-meat-industry-conditions/a-540...
Well those are the reasons, why I would not want to live there, even though I recognize it's economical superiority. Actually mostly the freedom of children. The other things you can solve with money. But your kids will have way more freedom in Germany and there is nothing money can do about it in the US.
Because there's not consensus about this as OP mentioned.
And it's not hard to see that this is the case. AfD is making sure of this.
Is the consensus about ignoring AfD and neonazis? Sometimes. :|
Are you saying those aren't issues?
Because I've lived in the US, and know many Europeans that have lived there or traveled there on holidays, and pretty much all of them agree that:
- the first time in their lives they were afraid of getting ill was when they started living in the US
- they were all astonished at the amount of homeless people living in tents in the downtowns of all major cities (here if a major city has like ~10 people sleeping outside in winter, that's bad, but the US is just shockingly bad)
- the first time in their lives they were afraid of getting killed was in the US (e.g. interacting with the cops, walking through some neighborhoods) because people were carelessly carrying guns outside (there are guns in Europe, some countries like Switzerland have a ton of guns, but the way people manage guns in public, and that includes police, is radically different)
- they were all astonished and the amount of fat people, and how fat they were. What people consider "fat" in Europe would probably be "normal" or maybe even "thin" in the US. You don't find in Europe people that are so fat that don't fit through the door of a bus.
These are not narratives, these are facts that every European that lives or has lived in the US will happily tell you about.
The US style of living is great if you have money, but Europeans measure their style of living by how the poorest people in their country live, not the richest people.
By those measures, the US is an outrageous place for pretty much all European standards.
> That's like saying Europe suffers from mass terrorist attacks and sexual assaults on young women.
Do you think that's a made up narrative? Because everyone I know in Europe agrees that this is true, that these are horrible issues to have, and that these issues need fixing.
Your argument that "the US has no issues because Europe has issues" is typically known as "whataboutism".
Don't be a "whataboutist". It doesn't help fix neither Europe's nor USA's issues.
Sorry, but wasn't grandparent's (u/allendoerfer) original post the one that started the whataboutism? I was just contradicting him with a mirrored whataboutism to prove why his way of thinking is wrong? Why are you only cherry picking mine?
The topic was regarding one of Germany's failure, and Grandparent (u/allendoerfer) posted something along the lines of "at least in Germany we have have breathable air and drinkable water unlike Americans who get shot instead".
What does that have to do with the Wirecard situation and how is that anything else but severe offtopic whataboutism?
>Europeans measure their style of living by how the poorest people in their country live, not the richest people.
No they don't, otherwise, the wealth-gap between rich and poor wouldn't be at an all-time high in Germany/Europe [1][2].
[1]https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/inherit...
[2]https://www.dw.com/en/study-shows-growing-wealth-inequality-...
The OP is making a trade-offs. They are arguing that they prefer the value proposition of living in Europe than that of living in the US. They don't seem to weight the downs of Europe or the pro's of the US much, so they are not mentioning them, which is IMO fair.
We can argue about these pros and cons, whether they missed some, whether we weight them differently, etc.
What I don't think is very helpful is just a straight "whataboutism" answer.
You, me, and the OP are all different. What's a good value proposition for the OP might be bad for you and me. That's ok. It does not make the OP "wrong".
The sexual assault issue seems to have been a couple of big nasty incidents, which were heavily spun by media personalities whose main line of business was talking up the threat of Islam. How big a problem this really is is hard to tell, especially since nightlife has been cancelled for fourteen months.
Sorry, but that's nonsense. In Rotherham or Cologne, the opposite was true: the media was actively working on covering it up, not "heavily spinning it" to talk up some threat.
He is actually right. They reported it 4 days late.
I don't know how the situation is in the US about these things, but if these problems do not exist there at all, its normal for Americans coming here and seeing it happen "occasionally" to freak out about it.
On healthcare, I've had to sit for 2-3 hours in an emergency room in London with my throat mostly closed struggling to breath because I hadn't turned blue yet (no kidding), which put me behind the people with stab wounds. That's a normal ordering of priority when there aren't any doctors available, but it was mostly because I was on a six-month waiting list to see an allergy specialist and hadn't yet been diagnosed. At least in the US, your only fear about getting sick is because you're worried about the cost. I had a xenophobic doctor (said I was just coming to the UK for the healthcare, hah, even though I was working and paying taxes) prescribe me medication I was allergic to despite saying over the course of several visits that I was. Luckily I looked up the medication before taking it.
As to homeless people, sure, there may be less in the cities (though still there), but in exchange you have shanty towns and cities setup on the outskirts like with Cañada Real outside of Madrid, or Christiania in Copenhagen. I've seen smaller ones in France (Nice and Paris), though at least one of them was removed, and know of short-lived ones (on the order of months and years) in London. On both sides of the pond you have people trying to make things better, like Utah's experiments or those of Helsinki.
As to violence, Europe is a dangerous place. If the people you've spoken to were afraid for the first time in their lives, that's mostly because people grow accustomed to their own brands of violence. I was about an hour away from being blown to bits in the 2004 Madrid bombings, I was lucky enough to have decided not to bring my family to the Promenade des Anglais in Nice the day the terrorist decided to drive his truck through the crowds, and I've experienced the terror that is walking through the streets of London at night during an uptick in knifings (never attacked myself, though a colleague was and escaped).
We can talk about the abduction of children like Madeleine McCann, or the acid attacks on people like Katie Piper. We can talk about the shootings in Northern Ireland, or the annexation of Crimea, but instead you should just look at the Wikipedia page on European terrorism, even though it's only one type of the violence you can encounter.
As to obesity in Europe: Yes, the USA is on top, though there are variations by city (and people trying to fix it), but I have seen people too fat to board a bus (and no, not Americans) in both England and France, at the least. Don't believe me? Look for pictures of Virginie Grossat, French (!) model size 54 (though I've never seen her in public, just ordinary people).
But what about your claim that Europeans measure their style of living by how the poorest people in their country live? What does that say when you look how the Syrian refugees were treated in Europe? Maybe they're discounted because they weren't citizens? Well then, how about how the Polish are treated in the UK and Ireland, or ex-colonial immigrants in France? What about eastern Europeans in general, or the Romani people?
None of this is meant to say that America is just great, or Europe just sucks (I happen to be very fond of both). Why do you think so many people emigrate to the US? What the grandparent was trying to say is that when creating this caricatured version of the US (or any place that happens to be "other"), then you end up engaging in the very thing you're decrying, "whataboutism", and you actually blind yourself to the reality.
This is not about whether these things exist or don't exit at some place, they exist everywhere in the world.
The difference is just the quantity, how often, how many, how much fatter.
Everybody I know that grew up in Europe and has traveled to or lived in the US found the difference in quantity "shocking".
The US is not a role model for Germany by any standards. But of course it can very well serve as a source of inspiration just like many other cultures and countries. Sadly, precisely this is a weakness of current policitcal elite.
It's painful how deliberately they are ignoring advances in drug legislation f.x.. We have many innovative projects just around the corner (Portugal, Switzerland, Netherlands to name some). Instead policitcal affairs are driven by dogmatism and ignorance. And that's precisely the reason for many issues regarding digitalization as well.
We export modern versions of the same motors we did for decades. Took one south african immigrant to overthrow our car companies plans for years.
> The university rankings do not take into account that research in Germany happens at Fraunhofer or Max Planck, which are door to door to their respective university and have shared staff. If all their papers would be taken into account, the rankings would change dramatically.
Quality over quantity. The bullshit those institutes publish regularly is laughable at best.
The country you is describe doesn't exist anymore. Germany failed to invest in education, now that there is a pandemic it gets crystal clear: we slept through 30 years of innovation and progress and looking at the current talking points in Berlin I am afraid we are still asleep at the wheel.
Especially Wirecard.. is such a failure on so many levels. Lead me to the conclusion: 90% of people half ass everything. It's like "The Wire" all the way. I bet you even Google, Apple and Facebook half ass stuff.. it's just a facade of elitism at those places.. Places like EY. Being a consultant, I've worked at several such places.. it's 100% true. (but to be fair they also had their share of brillant people)
So many people are pretending their way throughout their whole careers. While basically being incompetent.. or not giving a damn.. sigh.
A story I like particularly is the Phantom of Heilbronn (related to another big scandal: the NSU) which I think explain what is happening: Germans have a great confidence in them and other germans. They are very suspicious when something comes from outside Germany / Austria (like France, Italy, or UK), but if it is german it must be good and seriously done!
Truth is, Germany also has a share of slackers and fraudsters doing half assed stuff, but they admit their failures and sins only when it has become overwhelming, leading to crazy scandals. I still remember my colleagues who were proud of VW when the dieselgate came out. They were completely shocked. VW did this! They were expecting this from the sleazy french and italian, but not from their own beloved german company.
BER is a great example of course.
On the other side when they finally accept to take responsibility over something, you can count on them to do the job! Unfortunately you already lost months negotiating it, you would have been better off doing it yourself.
1) How cosy everyone in a given sphere is with each other
2) The nearly inevitable strip-club and coke in relationship building
3) The prevalence of kick-backs in contracts, although obviously euphemistically renamed.
4) How Germans accepted corruption as part of life
5) How they were proud that their corruption still got things built, unlike, say, the Italians
Now I don't really have much experience outside of these two countries, so maybe this is the norm around the world. But shit.
My DE parent company turned up on Muddy Water's[1] short list because of interesting share assignments, (paying above average for acquisitions) and unusual interactions with related entities. And I'm really not surprised.
And I really struggled to not use the word cosy repeatedly in this, because it was applicable to much of it, and really sums up Germany's informal corruption as I've experienced it.
Not that I claim NZ is any better, but here slight corruption doesn't feel like an accepted norm.
I did notice strange things which suggest corruption, like constantly rebuilding perfect roads, every time by the same companies but of course I got no proof.
Part of the problem is that German economy is ruled by industrial and media moguls. For them internet is whether "stupid websites", a medium serving copyrights violations, or legal compliance issue (see "Impressum" hysteria). Either way an issue rather than opportunity. With their geriatric population the strategy is basically - increase public media fee, 50mbit copper internet in every household, internet for broadcasting public media content while throttling any alternatives.
Certainly when American companies get to the right size they seem to become much closer to the political bodies that matter to them and their interests, as is the case likely everywhere
I wouldn't rush to this conclusion. US billionaires usually run many charity funds whereas German billionaires rarely do anything like that.
Also, German businesses owners don't seem to mind exploiting people's health and the environment (VW emissions scandal) or foreign workers [1] if it makes them money, so I think the same issues that plague capitalism in the US (greed) affect Germany too.
Otherwise, the wealth gap between rich and poor wouldn't be rising so steeply in Germany [2][3] if they wouldn't be so individualistic.
[1]https://m.dw.com/en/germany-meat-industry-conditions/a-54033...
[2]https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/inherit...
[3]https://m.dw.com/en/study-shows-growing-wealth-inequality-in...
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/eu-sues-germany-over-water-tainted-by-... [2] https://www.rhein-zeitung.de/deutschland-und-welt/wirtschaft... (no English source)
Definitely. It's a cultural thing, Germany (along with most Western countries) seems to follow the US in that regard.
The individualism <=> collectivism scale is well studied, and there's a significant gap between the US and Germany.
http://clearlycultural.com/geert-hofstede-cultural-dimension...
Everybody wants sellers to compete when they're buying, nobody wants to compete when they're selling.
> For them internet is whether "stupid websites", a medium serving copyrights violations, or legal compliance issue (see "Impressum" hysteria).
The large corporations and media companies had issues with the laws around imprints? That wasn't my perception at all. Rather, it was average people who wrote blogs etc who didn't want to put their real name, home address and tax IDs onto their sites for various reasons, but the law was so vague that nobody was sure their site wasn't "similar to the press" or "with commercial interest". Larger companies didn't care at all -- they were generally compliant way before that law was introduced.
If you write anything on the internet you're publishing content, ie. media might start consider you a competition, certainly after achieving certain visibility. Why not create an easy way to shot someone down or to suck someone into an expensive time consuming legal swamp?
I generally agree in that case, they were probably happy for that moat.
- this isn't the authoritative article on the origins of the wirecard scandal that the title would have you believe. It would be nice to read such an article but this isn't it.
- BaFin, the German regulator has historically been the one to trust but failed to verify. This to a large extent because they didn't have the budget or the staff to do their work properly, traits it shares with many other regulators around the world.
- Another problem is that regulators tend to have a two-way revolving door with the industry they are supposed to regulate. It is pretty rare to see a regulator that really takes such an industry to task.
- Finally, and more worrisome: Europe and the United States have both stopped being hungry. Yes, SV gives the USA a headstart for now, but keep in mind that SV is a spin-off of the MIC, and that without that MIC SV would have not existed as a phenomenon. The 'silicon' in silicon valley doesn't point to servers or hardware but to a much more basic element: the transistor, which displaced the vacuum tube. Back in the vacuum tube days electronics factories were much more wide-spread across the globe than they are today, the tech was much simpler and as a consequence the entry level was a lot lower. Once a country could make glass making vacuum tubes was a relatively small step away.
The distance between making glass and making modern chips is 50 years of investment in technology, a time horizon only very few regimes operate at, and usually those happen to be the plan-economies.
So for everybody else the doors are now firmly closed. Europe is on the backfoot, within another 50 years or so I expect the United States to be on the backfoot too.
Scandals like Wirecard are less rooted in the cycles of ascendancy of the tech world (though as a 'darling' Wirecard got away with more than they should have been able to) than they are in the simple fact that regulators are not operating independent of the industries they regulate.
Boeing 737 Max anybody?
Though the article specifically claims that this rarely happens in Germany, with the boundary between the political and commercial sphere being less porous than elsewhere.
If the EU wants to solve this they actually have a head start on other regions, they could investigate each others' industries. I'm sure the French would love to regulate the Germans and vice versa!
(Oh, and I do hope there'll be a TV series!)
I think that's because of their use of "origin". Both the title here and that of the article ("The Weird, Extremely German Origins of the Wirecard Scandal") can be taken two ways:
1. How the Wirecard scandal transpired
I think this is what you took it to mean. Where "origin" means the beginnings of the scandal itself. Much like saying "the origins of my success" when talking about my business career.
2. The environment that led to the Wirecard scandal being possible
I believe this is what the author actually sets out to do. In this the article didn't really look at the scandal itself, but rather the atmosphere -or place and time- from which Wirecard could have come happened in. This would be like saying "my origins" when describing that my family came from Wales.
Here is an timeline overview of wirecard: https://www.ft.com/content/284fb1ad-ddc0-45df-a075-0709b3686... ft probably has more in depth articles. If you want a more "entertaining" kind of video you can watch "ZDF Magazin Royale" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1g1jk_49r2U (Similar to the style of Last Week Tonight") It has English subtitles.
Ha. True. What a great read. Thanks for sharing.
> A scandal like Wirecard is powered by the dream that you could have an Uber without slashing workers’ protection—that one could hold on to what remains of the German social market economy while at the same time going all-in on laissez-faire capitalism.
;_; let us dream and stop holding up a mirror in front of us.