• 05/18/2020

Money is available - work is missing. Bring investments forward!

LIQUI MOLY Managing Director Ernst Prost on the obligation to invest

Ladies and gentlemen,

if everyone stops consuming and investing now than we can close the company.... I'm a friend of saving but please not now! Now we have to invest and produce goods, so that we don't produce more unemployed people... I've written it before: Our infrastructure is dilapidated, just like our schools, bridges collapse, roads look like after an earthquake and digital highways can be found abroad - but not here. Work is available and more than enough. Money is also available, more than enough. Laying off people now and making cuts to save money will damage the entire economy. What and how should an unemployed person with no income buy? Whose products or services? The fear (and the reality) to lose a job is already big enough. This bad situation doesn't have to be aggravated by announcing & implementing job cuts and refraining from investments, this applies equally to companies and the public sector. Just as the state is now asked to award contracts, the same applies to every company in our country. Otherwise, a terrible downward spiral will get underway. It is the task of politicians and managers to move the spiral in the other direction - towards an upswing! Invest, place orders and produce so that everyone can consume, this is the only way to avoid unemployment and bankruptcies. Saving and omitting everything possible is poison for the economy and jobs. How should tax revenues gush back, if not through productivity, income and consumption? 

Anyone who rejects this thinking and refuses this task first of all damages the national economy and in the next step also himself, because at some point unemployment will also affect his own company - and at some point the whole country. WE, in our company, have decided to even bring forward investments now in order to make our modest contribution to this necessary development for our economy!

Our current investments are of course being carried out consistently and according to plan, everything else would be counterproductive. An investment stop harms other companies that live from orders as we all do, and because we all live in a cohesive system, selfish behavior such as investment stops and layoffs ultimately harm ourselves and each individual. Anyone who now steps on the brakes as a nitpicker or small minded person will cause a multiple crash. Whoever steps on the gas, gets the economy going, and that is what we urgently need now and what WE are doing.

I wish us all a wonderful week.

Sincerely, 
Yours 

Ernst Prost