20260618 Sondervermögen sind Schulden

A Brief Lesson on Special Funds

After the 100 billion special fund for the Bundeswehr, it has become clear even to the last person that the whole thing has nothing to do with an actual fund, because those funds are almost depleted and what remains is 100 billion euros in additional debt for future generations. Yet this budgetary trick is nothing new. Guest author Andreas Hansel analyzes the history and beneficiaries of the term “special fund” on NorbertHaering.de.

He explains: The term “special fund” is not a product of the present. It has an instructive history. It begins in 1953 with the oldest special fund still in existence today, the ERP Special Fund, named after the “European Recovery Program,” the Marshall Plan. The Bundestag passed the corresponding law on July 3, 1953. The political father of the term was Franz Blücher, a member of the FDP, then Federal Minister for Marshall Plan Affairs and Vice Chancellor.

This special fund remains a notable exception, as it has grown into a positive balance of around 25 billion euros, including just under one billion euros in debt. The next one, the “German Unity Fund,” generated approximately 48 billion euros in debt outside the regular federal budget. In the course of the reunification with the GDR, this sum increased by an additional 171 billion in GDR and Treuhand debts through the “Legacy Debt Repayment Fund” in 1995.

Things really took a turn for the worse during the 2008 financial crisis. On October 17, 2008, the Bundestag created the “Financial Market Stabilization Fund” (SoFFin). This bailout package guaranteed up to 400 billion euros; 80 billion were used for direct recapitalizations of banks — the very institutions that caused the crisis. Further missteps included the Economic Stabilization Fund for COVID-19 and 60 billion allocated to the Special Fund for Climate and Transformation, though the latter could not be used due to a halt ordered by the Federal Constitutional Court.

In the spring of 2025, members of the Bundestag — who had actually already been voted out of office — allocated 100 billion euros to the Bundeswehr and 500 billion euros to infrastructure and climate neutrality. This debt is “scheduled” to run until 2065. But no one believes it will actually be repaid by then. The debt clock of the Taxpayers’ Association currently stands at 2,607,713,155,053 euros, bringing the per capita debt to 31,233 euros. This requires paying 1,503 euros per second in interest ...

And that brings us to the beneficiaries of the “special funds.” Among them is, for example, the U.S. asset manager BlackRock, which invests in German government bonds through its index funds. These secure, government-guaranteed, long-term interest payments will burden the federal budget with approximately 30 billion per year currently, rising to approximately 66 billion euros per year in the coming years.