Hacker News Reader

Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

Yea, but how?

The EU can barely get the Mercosur FTA out the door. How can it even attempt to make such a drastic change that would make FDI in the EU less attractive than equally large and equally onerous China?

And that ignores the fact that states like Poland, Ireland, and Czechia would ferociously fight back at anything that threatens their FDI driven economies.

Even Ireland opposed the Anti-Coercion Instrument [0] four days ago, and everyone still remembers Belgium's unilateral opposition to seizing frozen Russian assets barely a month ago.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/be-no-doubt-eu-will-ret...

View on HN

That Europe is incapable of doing anything bold is a different topic. You don't have to tell me how fundamentally screwed we are because of the consensus issue. But Europe could, without introducing capital controls, implement something. The US did, there is no fundamental reason why Europe could not either.

It's just a question of political will

If something is hypothetically possible but practically impossible, then the mental exercise is a waste of time, and distracts from thinking about an actual solution.

For example, Trump could impeached and removed from office, but that isn't happening. So what's the solution?

I exclusively responded to a comment about capital controls, which are even less likely. I'm not particularly interested in a discussion about what politicans might or might not do.

I think if people were forced to invest their pensions in shitty EU stocks there would be push back. Also moving public sector pensions into EU stocks won't deliver the growth required, they are already unsustainable.

But there's a chicken and egg effect here in that the stock prices are low because of low investment and the stocks are bad because the stock prices are low.

For instance, Meta has basically doubled in price from a few years back but their business is basically identical. Doesn't seem very efficient to me, at least.

I doubt that. Investment firms exist to find an edge. Any mispricing would be eventually exploited because the incentive to do so is so huge. That's what value investing is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com