Germans most worried about cost of living and migration, study finds - "Rising prices are the number one German angst, with 57% of respondents saying they are worried about the cost of living surging further."
Time to double down on green energy and reduce nuclear even more, and blame capitalism for ever higher costs
Germany’s rude economic awakening - "After years of turning a blind eye to what the rest of the world could plainly see, Germans are slowly coming to terms with the reality that they are in deep trouble as the four horsemen of their economic apocalypse come into view: an exodus of major industry; a rapidly worsening demographic picture; crumbling infrastructure; and a dearth of innovation... The latest economic indicators certainly won’t help Scholz’s chances. Germany is already the weakest economy in the G7. Just 15 years ago, as much of the West was still reeling from the financial crisis, Germany looked as if it had cracked the code to enduring prosperity. It managed to compensate for weakness in the U.S. and Europe by ramping up exports to China, where demand for its capital goods remained strong. No more. With an industrial base rooted in 19th-century technologies such as chemicals and machinery and a massive digital deficit, Germany is increasingly finding it difficult to compete. Once home to some of the premier global companies, from BMW to Adidas, the country is increasingly an also-ran. Of the 100 most valuable companies in the world, for example, just one — software developer SAP — is German... Tesla, a company German car executives once scoffed at, is now worth more than four times the German auto industry combined. In addition, Chinese consumer spending is struggling. The latest salvo of German doom landed late Monday with the announcement by U.S. chip giant Intel that it was placing its planned €30 billion German expansion on ice... Though German energy prices have stabilized following the shock triggered by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which cut off German industry’s access to cheap Russian gas, companies continue to cite high energy costs as a competitive disadvantage, a situation compounded by increasingly strict environmental norms for Germany’s traditional industries. In Duisburg, home to Europe’s largest steel-making plants, workers are bracing for substantial cuts. ThyssenKrupp, the erstwhile national steel champion, is struggling to remain competitive despite the promise of about €2 billion in government subsidies to ease its “transformation” away from CO2-emitting production. The government’s goal is to turn Duisburg into a center for “green” steel, replacing coal-fired steel furnaces with new ones powered by hydrogen. Whether that’s a realistic goal is a matter of dispute, given that creating “green hydrogen,” or hydrogen produced with renewable energy, requires copious amounts of both wind and electricity, which is both expensive and logistically difficult... Merz is running on a platform to bring back the good old days of the Germany economy, including by saving the combustion engine and by boosting productivity. “We want to and must remain an industrial country”"
More regulation will surely improve innovation, and more renewable energy will definitely make energy cheaper!
Meme - "The US during one weekend: *rocket launch, self-driving cars, robots*
Meanwhile in Europe: *bottle cap attached to bottle*"
What innovation looks like on both sides of the pond
Thread by @itsolelehmann on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "I'm German. 16 years ago, the EU and US economies were neck and neck. Today, the US economy is 50% larger than the entire EU combined. Here's the devastating truth behind Europe's ongoing economic suicide 🧵:
First, let's look at the numbers:
• US GDP: $25.5 trillion
• EU GDP: $16.6 trillion
But in 2008, they were nearly equal. What the hell happened over the past 16 years? It's simple: Europe chose security over growth. America chose innovation over regulation. The results? America has produced 9 trillion-dollar companies (9/10 of the most valuable companies in the world). Europe? ZERO. Nowhere to be found:
But it goes deeper than numbers... European talent is fleeing en masse. I see most European entrepreneurs choosing between two paths:
• The US for higher salaries ($350k+ tech jobs)
• Southeast Asia for lower cost of living to build startups
Why? Because Europe made it impossible to win at home. Take Berlin's startup scene (where I used to live): Founders are often viewed with suspicion. "Entrepreneur" = exploiter I witnessed tech founders being called "capitalist parasites" at local meetups.
Meanwhile in places like Silicon Valley and NYC: Founders are celebrated. Risk-taking is rewarded. Failure is seen as education, not embarrassment. To make matters even worse...
Europeans are drowning in red tape:
• Employment laws making hiring/firing impossible
• Tax rates crushing small businesses
• Compliance costs killing innovation
To start a company in France takes 84 days. In America? 4 days. Even French president Emmanuel Macron admits it. When comparing Europe to the American and Chinese markets, he said:
'The EU could die, we are on a verge of a very important moment. 'Our former model is over – we are over-regulating and under-investing. In the two to three years to come, if we follow our classical agenda we will be out of the market'.
The anti-innovation mindset is killing Europe. For example, when Elon Musk built Giga Berlin, Germans protested: "No techno-colonialism" Tesla almost cancelled the project due to regulatory hurdles and community opposition. This happens daily with smaller companies too.
Europe's regulatory culture created an economic spiral of doom:
• Talent leaves
• Companies avoid investing
• Innovation dies
• Economy stagnates
• More regulation follows
This is why memes like "Europoors" exist.
The numbers are brutal:
• 90% of EU tech talent would move to US for right offer
• European tech salaries: 50% lower than US
• Startup funding: 5x higher in US
And Europe's few tech successes? Most of them move to America:
• Spotify (now NYC-based)
• Klarna (major US operations)
• ARM (being acquired by NVIDIA)
The theme here is obvious: While Europe debates the ethics of AI... America builds it. While Europe regulates cryptocurrencies... America innovates them. While Europe protects old industries... America creates new ones. The solution? In my eyes, Europe must:
1. Slash regulations
2. Embrace risk-taking
3. Support entrepreneurs
4. Lower taxes on innovation
But will they? As a European, I unfortunately doubt it. The regulation addiction is too deep. The anti-business culture too ingrained. As one French friend/entrepreneur told me: "I love Europe, but I can't build my future here. The system won't let me." This is why America keeps winning. Not because Americans are smarter. But because their system benefits those who build.
Europe has become a museum:
• Great at preserving the past
• Terrible at building the future
Unless Europe slashes regulations and embraces risk-taking, the gap will only widen. As a German, this pains me deeply. I love Europe... The rich culture and history. The incredible cuisine. The best techno scene on Earth. The fact a 2-hour flight takes you to new worlds with new language, new culture, new country. I'm rooted here. But beneath this beautiful diversity lies a common problem: Every European country shares the same anti-entrepreneurship mindset. It doesn't matter if you're in Berlin, Paris, or Stockholm... The system is designed to hold builders back. This is forcing a generation of Europeans to make an impossible choice: Stay in a culture we love but can't build in? Or leave everything behind to chase opportunity? The question isn't if Europe will fall behind. It already has. It's on its way to irrelevancy. And its a reason why I'm currently looking to move out of the continent. The real question is.... Will they change course before its too late?"
Clearly, they need more regulation
Meme - Mohammed Soliman @ThisIsSoliman: "The only way for Europe to survive this century is to embrace the American model—manufacture and innovate. Being a regulatory superpower won’t save Europe."
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion: "Europe's elites have spent 25 years saying "Durr hurr, Europe is a GARDEN" and telling themselves that Americans are a bunch of fat gun-toting freaks with no health care and therefore their civilization doesn't have to do anything except regulate America's inventions. Oops."
Murray Bauman @MurrayBauman3: "It's insane how many leftist Americans want to embrace the EU model and implement it in the US while Europeans elites start to realize that their statist policies lead to nowhere. Ironic?"
Europe Regulates Its Way to Last Place - WSJ - "These are humbling times for Europe. The continent barely escaped recession late last year as the U.S. boomed. It is losing out to the U.S. on artificial intelligence, and to China on electric vehicles. There is one field where the European Union still leads the world: regulation. Having set the standard on regulating mergers, carbon emissions, data privacy, and e-commerce competition, the EU now seeks to do the same on AI. In December it unveiled a sweeping draft law that bans certain types of AI, tightly regulates others, and imposes huge fines for violators. Its executive arm, the European Commission, might investigate Microsoft’s tie-up with OpenAI as potentially anticompetitive. Never before has “America innovates, China replicates, Europe regulates” so aptly captured each region’s comparative advantage... to preserve competition, European regulators have resisted mergers that leave just a handful of mobile phone carriers per market. As a result Europe now has 43 groups running 102 mobile operators serving a population of 474 million, while the U.S. has three major networks serving a population of 335 million, according to telecommunications consultant John Strand. China and India are even more concentrated. European mobile customers as a result pay only about a third of what Americans do. But that’s why European carriers invest only half as much per customer and their networks are commensurately worse, Strand said: “Getting a 5G signal in Germany is like finding a Biden supporter at a Trump rally.” Putting European networks on a par with the U.S. would cost about $300 billion, he estimated. This has knock-on effects on Europe’s tech sector. Swedish telecommunications equipment manufacturer Ericsson’s sales in Europe suffer in part because many carriers are too small and unprofitable to update to the latest 5G networks. “Europe has prioritized shorter-term low consumer prices at the expense of quality infrastructure,” chief executive Börje Ekholm told me in Davos earlier this month. “I’m very concerned about Europe. We need to invest much more in infrastructure, in being digital.” Of course, Europe’s economy underperforms for lots of reasons, from demographics to energy costs, not just regulation. And U.S. regulators aren’t exactly hands-off. Still, they tend to act on evidence of harm, whereas Europe’s will act on the mere possibility. This precautionary principle can throttle innovation in its cradle. Starting in 2018, Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, imposed strict requirements on websites’ collection and use of personal data with fines of up to 4% of global sales. A study by University of Maryland economist Ginger Jin and two co-authors found this depressed European venture-capital investment relative to the U.S. over the next two years. Investors might have shunned business models that weren’t in compliance with, or less valuable because of, GDPR, they said. History might be about to repeat with AI... European regulation has a protectionist element, often crafted to hit American tech giants while sparing indigenous startups. Despite that, European startups rarely become giants, and even established companies are smaller than their U.S. counterparts. “I don’t think that the lack of winners in recent decades can be attributed to a single monocausal factor,” one European-born founder of a U.S. tech company told me. But Europe’s regulatory culture, including prosaic tax and labor laws, is near the top, he said. “Simply granting stock options, for example, is pretty difficult in most European countries. It’s famously difficult to part ways with hires that turn out to be misfits.” In a recent study, the McKinsey Global Institute noted Europe’s internal market is larger than China’s and almost as big as the U.S.’s. But when it compared companies with more than $1 billion in revenue, the U.S. firms spent 80% more on research and development, boasted 30% higher return on capital, and 1.3-percentage points faster revenue growth. As the U.S. and China put more muscle into their technological contest, Europe risks falling even further behind. China spends 2% to 5% of GDP on industrial policy—support of sectors deemed strategic—compared with Europe’s 1%... Brussels approved up to $1.3 billion of aid over eight years for cloud computing-related R&D, but that’s just 4% of what Amazon’s cloud division invests in a year... If Europe is going to compete with the U.S. and China, it will need to rethink its balance between regulation and innovation. As German economy minister Robert Habeck observed last fall: “If Europe has the best regulation but no European companies, we haven’t won much.”"
Meme - Michael A. Arouet @MichaelAArouet: "Eye-opening chart. Many Americans still follow principles of innovation, hard work and entrepreneurship, Europeans follow left narratives and believe that they can build prosperity by redistribution of someone else’s work and wealth. One cannot multiple wealth by dividing it."
"America's economy is nearly twice the size of the eurozone's. They were similar in 2008."
Richard Hanania on X - "Spain has a GDP per capita of $30K a year. It has been an economic basket case, with rock bottom fertility and poor growth. Now leftist activists are targeting one of the only industries it has, which is tourism. Europe is so committed to decline it's almost admirable."
Meme - saila @sailaunderscore: "No one hates to see a European succeed as much as European regulators."
"France to ban users' access to Polymarket: report
France's gambling regulator is reportedly preparing to ban Polymarket in the country. The crypto-based platform came to the regulator's attention after a report that a Frenchman used it to place massive bets on the US presidential election."
Matt Bateman on X - "The French Polymarket whale commissioned polls with a specific alternate methodology, the “neighbor method”
1. What a baller
2. What a killer example of how betting markets can surface contrarian, high quality signals"
Norway's 'trillion dollar man' says Americans work harder than Europeans | Fortune Europe - "Norway’s “trillion-dollar man” believes America’s attitude toward failure is helping propel the nation ahead of its European counterparts—where workers may have a better work-life balance but aren’t as ambitious. Nicolai Tangen leads Nordic behemoth Norges Bank Investment Management, which governs the revenue earned by Norway’s oil and gas resources, with the aim of ensuring its benefits are distributed fairly between current and future Norwegian generations. Under Tangen’s leadership since 2020, and over the past decade, the $1.6 trillion fund has invested more and more heavily in the U.S. instead of its closer neighbors in Europe—and it’s no coincidence. America’s performance, particularly in innovation, is “worrisome” in contrast to Europe, Tangen told the Financial Times. Part of it comes down to mindset, Tangen added, and how accepting each continent is of mistakes and risk: “You go bust in America, you get another chance. In Europe, you’re dead,” he said. But it goes deeper than that; there’s a difference in the “general level of ambition,” he added. “We are not very ambitious. I should be careful about talking about work-life balance, but the Americans just work harder,” Tangen continued... countries like the U.K. have a statutory requirement entitling staff to 28 paid days of leave a year if you’re a full-time employee. In the U.S. it is not a legal requirement for staff to be given any paid time off. However, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average employee who is in their first year of service takes eight PTO days... Investments in the U.S. now represent 46.9% of Norges Bank’s portfolio, whereas a decade ago the U.S. represented just under 30%. Going back a further 10 years, in 2003 the organization’s investment in America made up just 26.3% of all investments... “I’m not saying it’s good, but in America you have a lot of AI and no regulation; in Europe you have no AI and a lot of regulation. It’s interesting,” Tangen added."
Europeans ‘less hard-working’ than Americans, says Norway oil fund boss - "His views are significant as the oil fund is one of the largest single investors in the world, owning on average 1.5 per cent of every listed company globally and 2.5 per cent of every European equity."