I can’t wait to see what will happen when German auto industry crashes. It will be a very very interesting domino fall. Unfortunately I’ll watch it from inside, so it won’t be fun, but it will be interesting nonetheless.
Export markets will of course collapse outside of the very high-end. But that has been slowly occurring over the last few years anyway.
I think there will be even stronger trend of european brands put on Chinese made cars. Like Renault is already doing with Dacia Spring. Brands themselves will survive, even companies themselves may survive, but many of them may be just headquarters. Moving production means supply chain follows. And that's where most of the jobs are. Over time R&D will follow factories. So for the job market it could be pretty close to full-on crash.
Because they believed the actually had a chance of remaining competitive in the Chinese market.
Turns out that was highly delusional in hindsight.
You can’t have both..
Once that's complete and the dependence on the US is broken, expect more dramatic moves.
It generally punches below its geopolitical weight, but that’s because it was happy to follow the US when American policies were decent (not great, but good for trade and mostly good for stability). But that’s not a law of nature, things do change, even if it is slow compared to the modern news cycle.
At the same time, there are things to keep in mind:
- this is asking member-states to delegate some of their sovereignty, which is never all easy and always involves quite a bit of horse-trading
- the member-states are perfectly happy to fuck things up on their own and things like growth figures for the eurozone actually mask very different realities depending on the country and its government
- stagnation is a very western point of view, things are still changing quite a lot on the eastern side
- the reference point should be the same situation without the EU. I am not sure, for example, that things would be improved with a trade war between Germany and France, the baltics fending off for themselves, or each country having its own import requirements and sets of tariffs.
I do also strongly believe that the Eurozone or a rather a monetary union without a fiscal union hasn’t been the best idea as far as south-north goes.
And then you have countries which are doing quite well despite retaining their free-floating currency.
They existed long before the EU was called the EU, but that is misleading.
Both the customs union and the common market were created in 1957 with the European economic community, which got a new name and a coat of paint to become the EU in 1993. Both are fundamental parts of the European project. They would not exist without the EU and the EU would not exist without them.
Poland is an interesting case in that you can retain a free floating currency and your own monetary policy and still do quite well.
The EU being what it is considering to start planning to make a plan to take moves to plan these moves.
Then it will have to align those plans with all its members etc.