Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

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This is a negative-sum choice being made by everyone but China. Chinese cars will decimate the European motor industry. Volvo is already gone. BMW, Porsche, Volkswagen will follow. This will hurt Europe a lot more than it will hurt America.

The pressures of a democratic society will force Western governments to extract money from their productive sectors and redirect them to their comparatively unproductive auto sectors.

Watching an increasingly aging Europe try to sustain its expensive welfare state while losing its biggest industries and facing a war citizens don't have the heart to prosecute is going to be interesting. Already French retirees make more than the average working man there.

They won't fight. They won't work. They won't provide children. To retirees, replacing local industry with Chinese manufacturing is a no-brainer: everything gets cheaper. With the resulting loss of well-paying jobs, healthcare for the elderly and wait staff will get even cheaper. A bonanza for a generation soon to disappear leaving the bits to be picked up by their most ardent fans.

Everyone is going to be hurt, but if you're not the US you need to hedge. Being firmly aligned with the US is too dangerous right now. Lots of negative costs and outcomes come with that hedging.

Not really sure who it's going to hurt most.

China is the only vertically integrated economy left. In a multipolar/bifurcated/low trade world they will be the strongest.

The NAFTA/EU trade blocks were extraordinarily strong, this Greenland business is exactly the kind of issue which can shatter the entire block. It benefits no one to give Greenland to the US, so they won’t do it without a fight. It provides no benefit to the US to take it.

The only thing that would really be settled by the US annexing another country on a presidents whim is the formal end of the U.S. separation of powers.

Yup. They're damned if they do and damned if they don't. They question is, place your eggs in one basket and become subservient to one country or diversify and try to play others against each other.

I don't think you understand the bigger issue. Locking out competitors will save these jobs for now, but it will not last forever. This is exactly what happened to the US automakers in the 80s and look at them now.

> This will hurt Europe a lot more than it will hurt America.

It will hurt Europe a lot. But Donald Trump keeps repeating that it is going to declare war on the EU. Sadly, it makes sense for the EU to align more closely with China.

And yeah, the only winners from the Trump administration so far are the mega-rich, Russia and China. At the expense of strictly everybody else.

While at the same time going to war with Russia, a China ally and supporting an independent Taiwan?

Taiwan is more of an American concern. China could be persaded to rein in Russia if they gain Europe from the US' sphere

I guess some people hate Trump so much that they will embrace China, cut off relations with the US, and trash their economy regardless of geopolitics.

I mean, yeah, if a country declares war on us (or claims that it's going to do so) and does its best to trash our economy, we will embrace whichever allies we can find, cut off relations with the country that has declared war, and our economy will be trashed.

And yeah, we'll probably hate the leader who took the decision.

Not sure what your point is.

I don't see EU making a deal with China that lets them sell their slave built cars without tariffs. As I feel it there are a lot of public opinion against buying Chinese cars atm. Some did like 5 years ago but not any more. They are almost as dead as Tesla.

German car makes do have issues, but I'm sure they will work it out.

Source: https://motorbranschen.mrf.se/undret-som-kom-av-sig/ (Swedish)

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