Germany desperately needs a wake-up call in the form of recession. German car industry has been non-competitive for multiple years now. Instead of letting it fail, the government kept on flushing money down the toilet and prolonging the inevitable.
For a business, there's no incentive anymore to choose Germany over other EU countries. Cheap energy is gone. Germany is literally collapsing under its own weight: endless bureaucratic structures that just keep on growing.
Energy prices? Unit labour costs? Pisa Scores? VC Investments as percentage of GDP? Number of IPOs? Taxation of Income? Punctuality of public transport?
Cheap russian gas is gone, so now all industry sectors (not only cars) are not as competetive as before.
They are now downsizing, etc in order to save themselves.
Sure but we are talking about german industrial output, and one of the main reasons for problems here is the absence of the cheap energy that was available until the russian invasion of ukraine.
> Germany desperately needs a wake-up call in the form of recession. German car industry has been non-competitive for multiple years now. Instead of letting it fail, the government kept on flushing money down the toilet and prolonging the inevitable.
Just let it fail? I'm reminded of this, which I read recently about rare earths:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/12/business/china-rare-earth...:
> Rare earth refineries and magnet factories all over the world have been buying Chinese equipment for the past 20 years. Many equipment vendors in North America and Europe closed when most of the world’s rare earth mining shifted to China in the late 1990s.
I'm sure that, at the time, people were saying that North American and European rare earth equipment manufacturers were "non-competitive for multiple years now."