Maybrit Illner on saving: I'm in the basement, looking for interest rates

Oh yes, back then. It goes nostalgically on "Maybrit Illner", with excerpts from the consumer show "Caution, trap", shoulder-cushioned TV people and well-designed austerity strategies: You put your money on the passbook, so that it increases. Today, on the other hand, the first Volksbank demands from each new customer who opens a call money account a negative interest rate of 0.5 percent. And the next banks are catching up soon.

This is the conflict that Illner addresses: "Interest in the basement, precaution in danger - when is saving worthwhile again?" The title question is a bit misleading, because "when" it's worth it again, that's less about it. Rather, under what conditions.

That it can not go on anyway in any case, in this is the first round in principle agreed. The one - the left-wing MP Sahra Wagenknecht, who is now functionless, but still a TV leadership figure of their party - finds that negative interest rates are "the wrong way", which is why there must be "rules" that "simply prohibit such punitive interest" , The other - Mike Mohring, CDU, chairman of the Conference of Budgetary and Financial Policy Speakers of the Union Parliamentary Groups - also says that "the little man" must be protected.

The low interest rate policy of the European Central Bank (ECB) brings in the opinion of the Thuringian CDU leader Mike Mohring savings banks and Volksbanken in Germany at great risk.

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Only how, and what exactly? It gets as interesting as confusing. Because constantly from somewhere still another aspect is piled up, which makes the initial Kleinsparerbehütungsgespräch a fiscal policy discussion. Speculative bubbles, "black zero", the zero interest rate policy of the European Central Bank - all in it. For one moment you almost expect that somebody will go down to the interest rates - what are they, after all, "in the basement"? - to see if the "little man" still has canned Mirabelle plums in stock. In the next, bridges "from the time of Kaiser Wilhelm" and lack of investment in climate protection, education or digital infrastructure are complained. It is a great course, which emotionally docks to the good old small passbook.

In the bank is sold, not advised

Marcel Fratzscher, head of the German Institute for Economic Research, thinks one must first clarify who to talk about when it comes to the difficulty of saving: 40 percent of Germans would have "virtually no savings" because of their low income Interest rate not crucial. The problem is low interest rates, especially for the middle class. He holds it all in a largely Solomonish: "The black zero is right in good times", but now? Now you have to "put money into the hand", especially since low interest rates are "good for debtors".

Dorothea Mohn, a financial expert from the Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverband, says the situation for "consumers" is difficult, but five percent interest rates earlier did not mean higher purchasing power because of "high inflation". It was important not to leave the old-age provision to the insurance industry: What bank counseling hot, were actually sales talks.

A pension fund will be used instead, for example, the Riester pension. And she wants to know why the state-organized standard provision product, which the CDU has decided, could only come in three years: "Strike out the three years from your decision!" She asks Mike Mohring, who does not appeal to her.

Somebody wanted to sell his book first of all

And while the Swedish model is foreseen, which provides that 2.5 percent of the salary obligatory flow into a funded private insurance for old age, Sahra Wagenknecht takes the example of Austria on the radar: why mandatory stocks? Why not strengthen the statutory pension instead? But she has "a lot of sympathy," says Dorothea Mohn, but she does not see that the policy is ready. In any case, there is no way around equities "massively diversified, worldwide" - "we expected that".

The former faction leader of the Left in the Bundestag, Sahra Wagenknecht, considers the currently discussed pension fund to be superfluous.

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Missing the somewhat irritating final chapter. Performance Marc Friedrich, who is in the bestseller lists with a book about the supposedly upcoming crash of the financial world. Until then, he has been discussing, now he accuses with sharp words - the policy first and foremost, which is "down the line" failure, "lethargic" and "incompetent" in which therefore the actual "shortage of skilled workers" prevail. "We're in the monetary endgame," he says, predicting that the next and then really big crash will be in 2023 at the latest. After analysis, this really does not sound anymore. In the first place probably a book is sold here as if it were a Riester contract

Marcel Fratzscher, who once worked for the European Central Bank, speaks of "black painting" and "demagogy"; Wagenknecht, on the other hand, at least agrees with Friedrich that no "politics for the people" is being made. But, she says too, "I find it a bit negligent to tell that with a comforting shower." Maybe you could have actually saved this lecture.