When Germans talk about the stock exchange, the image of the lottery shop is one of the friendlier comparisons. According to the reputation of the trading floor, profits are as random on the stock exchange as success with the lottery ticket. At first glance, it may seem surprising that traders and employees of the Hamburg, Hanover and Düsseldorf stock exchanges have now chosen the word “random profits” as the stock market nonsense of the year 2022. So much self-mockery on the floor?
Strictly speaking, however, the word “accidental profits” played a role in the past year on the political stage, not on the heart-smoked oak panels of the stock exchange: Anyone who produced wind, coal or nuclear power cheaply could earn enormous sums at peak times of horrendous electricity prices. Retroactive to December 1st, the federal government now wants to “skim” a part of these random profitshttps://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/.”In the best non-word manner, the random profits quickly became a dictum among stock traders,” says Rolf Deml, the head of the Düsseldorf Stock Exchange. “There was humorous speculation as to whether ice cream manufacturers or breweries would be the next industries in the hot summer.”
However, it is not only worthwhile to dissect the strange career of the word in terms of content – but also linguistically. What at first glance looks like a compound word from the two syllables chance and profit turns out to be a linguistic duplication on closer inspection. So chance today means only a “surprising event”, comes from linguistic history however, from Middle New High German accidentally from which “possessment or benefit accruing to someone”. Strictly speaking, coincidence already carries the profit in itself. One could also say: the chance win win.
The verbal acrobatics of the Berlin politicians were just as crooked as this doubling when they brought the word into the political debate on September 4 last year. While there was talk throughout the summer of “over-profits” by the big oil multinationals, which the Greens in particular wanted to “tax away”, this did not suit the liberal Finance Minister Christian Lindner – neither politically nor linguistically. That Sunday, the Berlin traffic light coalition agreed on the formula of the “accidental profits” of the electricity producers, which they want to “skim off” in the future. And which are not formally a tax either.
In the Southgerman newspaper Incidentally, the word was first used on June 26, 1971, when former farmland was diligently re-declared as building land. At the time, housing minister Lauritz Lauritzen, SPD, spoke of the non-performing increase in assets, a pure chance win for “kings of fortune”. Lauritzen himself bridged the gap to the lottery, estimating the increase in assets through the rededication of land at seven billion marks a year, 20 million marks a day – or “40 main prizes in the lottery”.
This is where the third absurdity of the word comes into play: the electricity producers are to be deprived of part of their profits because they ultimately arose by chance. In the lottery, however, winners collect the sum tax-free. Reason? This is pure coincidence.