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Comment by TekMol | Hacker News Reader

If a country like Germany is losing more and more of its clout, by losing out on internet, AI and now their car industry - does that make it a good place to live for someone who's business is international?

Will prices for rent etc go down?

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Supply chains are global. Germany still has an edge on machine tools and precision engineering.

If you own a business Germany is decidedly not a good place to live due to the tax burden and the bureaucracy.

CFC & management and control rules will make any company owned by you essentially a German company and you’ll have to be rectally examined by Finanszamt quite often.

That's why you employ a good "Steuerberater". They fist the Finanzamt rectally.

When in Germany, do as the (successful) Germans do.

Would likely do better in Portugal or Spain wrt cost of living and proximity to Europe. Wealth tax to keep in mind for Spain.

EDIT: I tilt towards rural/low density areas. Understand the cosmopolitan desire though.

Lisbon is pretty, but I think it might feel a bit small after a while. Theres not that much going on.

Not yet sure about Barcelona.

Barcelona (and Catalonia in general) is getting more expensive and crime is rising. There are scary junkies on the streets downtown. A lot of expats are leaving. But it is still fun if you like to party. I guess it's good if you are in your 20s and have good income.

Spain is rising taxes while cost of living is rising, too. Rent controls made the prices skyrocket. But if you have low income or live off savings (i.e. low income tax), small Spanish towns are a great choice. Pretty places, friendly open people, good weather. YMMV

If you're looking at it from a purely financial perspective, Germany is a very costly place to live/run a business because of the high tax rate.

This might be a hot take, but I think Germany is suffering from a sort of Dutch disease with its car industry.

Germany has a lot of human capital, experienced and well educated workforce, but a lot of it got sucked into the car industry, because it was so profitable until now. I hope that with the car industry sunsetting, hopefully we'll see new innovative companies spring up.

Germany is not losing out on anything. It is simply structured so that there are no large public companies. A private german grocery store is taking over the US. There‘s a bunch of specialized companies producing stuff like Zeiss doing lenses for ASML. This is more or less just spurred by doomer rhetoric.

That's absurd, there are many large corporations in Germany, including VW, BMW, SAP, Deutsche Telekom, Siemens, Bosch. A lot of the Mittelstand is also directly dependent on those large corps as their subcontractors.

Rent has already gone down

Source?

This chart (click on max) seems to say the opposite:

https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/rent-inflation

And from what I hear, the real rent inflation (on the free non-subsidized market) has been even higher over the recent years. Like 7% per year.

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