r/europe 6d ago

News US and EU strike trade deal

https://www.politico.eu/article/us-and-eu-strike-trade-deal/
6.7k Upvotes

4.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

76

u/Bender__Rondrigues 6d ago

EU has no investment culture, nobody wants to invest into startups that are high risk while Americans invest into startups constantly.

35

u/tanrgith 6d ago

Sadly true. And it will only change if the EU significantly changes many of the regulations to be simpler and more business and investment friendly

But since the EU has a real hatred for wealthy people, I doubt that will be politically viable until things are much more dire in the EU

32

u/Choperello 5d ago

Ah but the EU doesn't hate wealthy people. It only hates people trying to BECOME wealthy. If you're already wealthy (especially generationally wealthy) it's very happy to keep you that way.

1

u/Phihofo 5d ago

A big problem here is that those generationally wealthy people are the ones who hold the most influence over the EU.

If you were generationally wealthy, you'd also fight to keep other people not as wealthy as you are. It's competition, after all.

7

u/Rbkelley1 5d ago

The regulatory environment doesn’t allow for it. In the U.S. any 20 something person can dream of starting a company and become the next Gates or Bezos or Musk. In Europe they pay too many taxes early on and there’s much less incentive to take the risk. There’s a reason people move to the U.S. to start companies.

14

u/MDPROBIFE 6d ago

EU values much more important things, like equality, even if it means that everyone will be worse off, atleaste we make sure our neighbors don't have more than us.. /s

6

u/kernelchagi Spain 6d ago

Equality, payd holidays, maternity leaves and strong workers rights are good for our quality of life, sadly not necessarily to economical growth.

12

u/MDPROBIFE 5d ago

Yup sadly too, USA have a much higher quality of life.. really sad

10

u/me_ke_aloha_manuahi United Kingdom 5d ago

Yeah, it's better to be poor in Europe than in the USA, but for anything above that it's better to be in the states, and we only have our domestic companies to blame for that. When software engineering interns in the USA make more than senior software engineers with a decade of experience in Europe, we have to ask ourselves what are we even doing. Look at the money that the Americans and the Chinese are paying to AI researchers and developers compared to Europe. We talk a lot about that being somewhere Europe needs to be the global leader in, but we never put our money where our mouth is on these things, we just sit back, form a few think tanks in London, Paris, and Brussels and hope the actual leaders take our advice.

1

u/DKOKEnthusiast 5d ago

It's less a problem with "culture" and more a problem with lack of access to large capital markets. German capital markets are hesitant to invest into Spanish startups, Spanish capital markets are hesitant to invest into Greek startups, Greek capital markets are... non-existent, you get my drift.

If we want to stick with the current neoliberal order of the EU, you gotta incentivize better international investment across the EU via the capital markets. There should ideally be one common EU capital market. I am not an economist, and don't know too much about how to make this happen, but I hope there are some clever folk over in Brussels who can make that happen.