Business valuation

The quietest word on this page is der Barwert, present value: what a stream of future payments is worth in money today. Its first half is the adjective bar, and an English reader already owns it, because bar and bare are the same Germanic word. Its old meaning was naked, uncovered, and it survives in barfuß, barefoot. Bares Geld was money in plain view, held in the hand rather than promised, and from there bar came to mean simply cash: bar zahlen, das Bargeld. Der Barwert keeps exactly that sense. Every forecast in ein Bewertungsgutachten is a promise dated some years ahead; diskontieren strips the date off and leaves the bare amount, as if it were paid in cash on the valuation date. Two valuers who disagree rarely disagree about that arithmetic. They disagree about the rate that does the stripping.