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[19 Dec 2024|10:51pm] |
Eiropieši esot noguldījuši bankās 14T un negribot taisīt VC kā amerikāņi dara. Nu tā nauda jau nestāv bankās. Bankas jau tālāk pērk vai nu valdības parādzīmes (labi?), izsniedz kredītkartes (labi?) vai hipotēkas (ļoti labi? cilvēkiem vajag telpu un, ja sistēma nodrošina, ka NĪ cenas pastāvīgi aug ātrāk par inflāciju, tad tur ir kāds ākis?).
Bet Dragi, Lagarde un Leijena snaikstās pēc šīs eiropiešu naudas. Un tad nu top šis:
Europe’s economic apocalypse is now
Stagnation, flagging competitiveness, Donald Trump. The continent is facing "an existential challenge."
https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-economic-apocalypse/
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That means European capitals, already struggling to rein in surging deficits amid dwindling tax revenue, will face even greater financial strains, which could trigger further political and social upheaval.
Recessions and trade wars may come and go, but what makes this juncture so perilous for the continent’s prosperity has to do with the biggest inconvenient truth of all: the EU has become an innovation desert.
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Once synonymous with cutting-edge automotive technology, Europe today doesn’t have a single entry among the 15 bestselling electric vehicles.
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If Europe remains on its current trajectory, its future will also be Italian: that of a decaying, if beautiful, debt-ridden, open-air museum for American and Chinese tourists.
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“We are living through a period of rapid technological change, driven in particular by advances in digital innovation and unlike in the past, Europe is no longer at the forefront of progress,” European Central Bank (ECB) President Christine Lagarde said in November.
Speaking at the medieval Collège des Bernardins in Paris, Lagarde warned that Europe’s vaunted social model would be at risk if it doesn’t change course quickly.
“Otherwise, we will not be able to generate the wealth we will need to meet our rising spending needs to ensure our security, combat climate change and protect the environment,” she said.
Draghi, who presented his report to the European Commission in September, was more blunt: “This is an existential challenge.”
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If Europe had a more solid economic foundation and were more competitive with the U.S., Trump would have little leverage over the continent.
The degree to which Europe has lost ground to the U.S. in terms of economic competitiveness since the turn of century is breathtaking. The gap in GDP per capita, for example, has doubled by some metrics to 30 percent, due mainly to lower productivity growth in the EU.
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Put simply, Europeans don’t work enough. An average German employee, for example, works more than 20 percent fewer hours than their American counterparts.
A further cause of Europe’s sagging productivity is the corporate sector’s failure to innovate.
U.S. tech companies, for example, spend more than twice what European tech firms do on research and development, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). While the U.S. companies have seen a 40 percent jump in productivity since 2005, productivity in European tech has stagnated.
That gap is also apparent in the stock market: While U.S. stock market valuations have more than tripled since 2005, Europe’s have risen by just 60 percent.
“Europe is falling behind in emerging technologies that will drive future growth,” Lagarde said in her Paris speech.
That’s an understatement. Europe isn’t just falling behind, it’s not really even in the race.
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A quarter of a century later, Europe has not only failed to achieve its goal, but it’s fallen well behind both the U.S. and China.
Europe never even achieved its aim to spend 3 percent of the bloc’s GDP on R&D, the main driver of economic innovation. In fact, spending on such research by European companies and the public sector remains pegged at about 2 percent, about where it was in 2000.
Europe’s universities would be a natural place to jump-start innovation and research, but here too the continent is an also-ran.
Of the top global universities reviewed by Times Higher Education, only one EU institution ranked in the top 30 — Munich’s Technical University — and it was tied for 30th place.
Europe’s investment in R&D “is not just too little, but a substantial amount is flowing into the wrong areas,” Ifo’s Fuest said.
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That’s where Germany comes in. The dirty little secret of European R&D spending is that half of it comes from Germany. And most of that investment flows into one sector: automotive.
While that might seem obvious given the sector’s size (the German auto industry’s annual revenue is nearly half a trillion euros), it’s not where you can get the most bang for your buck (or euro). That’s because innovations in the auto sector, such as improving an engine’s fuel efficiency, are incremental.
In other words, the companies are literally reinventing the wheel, instead of whole new products, like an iPhone or Instagram, that would create a whole new market.
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If nothing else, Europe has been quite consistent. In 2003, the top corporate investors in R&D in the EU were Mercedes, VW and Siemens, the German engineering giant. In 2022, they were Mercedes, VW and Bosch, the German car parts-maker.
Overall, putting all Europe’s eggs in one basket worked out pretty well … until it didn’t. Though Europe accounts for more than 40 percent of global R&D spending in the automotive sector, Germany’s vaunted carmakers somehow managed to miss the boat on electric vehicles.
That failure is at the core of Germany’s economic malaise, as evidenced by VW’s recent announcement that it would shutter some German plants for the first time in its history. Germany’s auto sector, which employs about 800,000 domestically, has been the lifeblood of its economy for decades, contributing more than any other sector to the country’s growth.
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What makes the crisis in Germany’s car industry so intractable for Europe is that the continent has nothing else to fall back on.
Here too, the contrast with the U.S. is stark.
In 2003, the biggest corporate spenders on R&D in the U.S. were Ford, Pfizer and General Motors. Two decades later, it’s Amazon, Alphabet (Google) and Meta (Facebook).
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Given how dominant those players and the rest of Silicon Valley are in the tech world, it’s difficult to see how European tech could ever play in the same league, much less catch up.
One reason is money. U.S. startups are generally funded through venture capital. But the pool of venture capital in Europe is a fraction of what it is in the U.S. In the past decade alone, U.S. venture capital firms raised $800 billion more than their European competitors, according to the IMF.
Instead of investing their money in the future, Europeans prefer to leave it in cash at the bank, where about €14 trillion worth of Europeans’ savings are being slowly eaten away by inflation.
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“Europe’s shallow pools of venture capital are starving innovative startups of investment and making it harder to boost economic growth and living standards,” a team of IMF analysts concluded in a recent analysis.
So if cars and IT are out, the EU could just lean on the 19th-century technologies in which it’s always excelled like machinery and trains, right?
Unfortunately, this is where the Chinese come in.
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If only. Draghi’s report got about a day’s worth of coverage in the continent’s major media outlets and then was quickly forgotten. Similarly, the perpetual ringing of alarm bells by the IMF and ECB falls on deaf ears.
That’s likely because Europeans aren’t really feeling any pain — not yet anyway.
While the EU might account for an ever-dwindling share of the world’s GDP, it leads all the global tables when it comes to the generosity of its members’ welfare systems.
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The likely result is a radicalization of politics, as Greece experienced during its debt crisis, as populists on the far right and left seize the opportunity to attack the establishment.
That radicalization is already underway in a number of countries, most worryingly in France. The success of the fringe is all the more disquieting when considering that the worst of the economic pain is likely yet to come.
The trouble is, by the time Europeans wake up to their new reality, it may be too late to do much about it.
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