Obituary for Nikolaus Piper – Economy

Sometimes you wonder what fate is trying to tell you when certain events occur on the same date.

It was September 15, a Sunday, when Nikolaus “Nik” Piper set out on New York’s Wall Street in 2008. “You won’t believe what’s going on here,” he shouted into the phone as he was in the editorial office of the South German Newspaper in Munich. Bankers and politicians met in the building of the central bank, the Federal Reserve, limousines rushed in and out of the Fed Palace's underground car park. Inside, the fate of Lehman Brothers was being decided – and the big question was whether one of the world's most important investment banks could go bankrupt. In the end, it had to, because no one was prepared to save Lehman Brothers: neither the big banks, nor the government in Washington, nor Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. In the weeks that followed, the world plunged into the worst financial crisis in six decades.

Since then, Nikolaus Piper has written about this hot, humid day that changed the world. The “wild days in Manhattan,” as a 2013 report called it, had a lasting impact on his life as a journalist. They made him, the pugnacious supporter of the market economy, a little more lenient, a little more pragmatic. Even during the financial crisis, you suddenly read editorials by Nik in which he vehemently advocated stronger state intervention, in which he defended the massive rescue packages with which the US government tried to prevent things from getting worse after the Lehman crash. And he also approved of the tougher rules that politicians subsequently imposed on the banks.

“No, capitalism is not bad.”

But Nikolaus Piper did not make this shift because he suddenly began to doubt the market economy, but precisely because he believed in it – as long as it operates within economically sensible rules. In an essay entitled “No, capitalism is not bad” he once wrote: “Complaining about 'unfettered' markets should make one suspicious.” That would imply that fettered, even immobile markets are a good thing. A fatal error.”

Nikolaus Piper was and remained an ordoliberal. He was influenced by his studies of economics in Freiburg, where Walther Eucken, Franz Böhm and others had developed this German version of capitalism in the 1950s: a market economy with a regulatory framework. But as he grew older, the liberal in Nik also believed more and more in “the Ordo principle,” in the rules that are needed.

And now it is September 15th again, another Sunday, when the sad news begins to spread that Nikolaus Piper has died at the age of 72. Er, the subtle, clever, friendly Nik. One of the great, award-winning explainers in German business journalism. An author and thinker who knows how to present complex economic developments and relationships in such a way that even laypeople can understand them.

That's why every October, the business editorial team never gave much thought to who would be honoring the Nobel Prize winner this time. Nik, of course! In October 2022, he therefore also wrote about Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman who dumped Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008, and later did everything he could to prevent a complete collapse like in the 1929 economic crisis. Piper wrote that Bernanke had once researched that very great crisis of 1929 and said that understanding it was the “Holy Grail of Economics.”

Understanding the economy: that was also Piper's main concern. He did not always try to convince people with arguments that he could formulate in his editorials and essays as clearly and precisely as few others could. And he remained calm in his texts and in the debates in the editorial office, argued on the merits, never sought a tough confrontation, but always sought a balance.

Often he just wanted to enlighten, to explain, in the newspaper as well as in his books. The first was entitled “The Great Economists” and was published in 1994. At that time, Piper worked – after working for Baden Newspaperthe SPD party newspaper Forward and the news agency Related Press for – for the Time in Hamburg. In 1997 he moved to Hamburg for the first time and, after a short return to Time, In 1999 he finally moved to the SZ in Munich, where he headed the business department until 2007. His favorite book, however, was “Felix and our dear money,” a children's book that he wrote for his son in 1999 and which rightly won an award.

A year ago, on the 15th anniversary of Lehman Brothers, Nikolaus Piper again looked at the crash of 2008 in the SZ newspaper – and the upheavals that it caused first in the economy, then in society and finally in politics. “The Lehman bankruptcy was the accelerant for right-wing populism,” he wrote in an editorial. And continued: “Nobody can know whether Donald Trump would have become US President in 2008 without the consequences of the financial crisis.” But he took massive advantage of the climate of the insurance industry – just like the AfD is now.”

And it all began on a sultry September 15th in New York.