Because most of the time, the point of such government "investments" is to be another hidden wealth transfer from the taxpayers into the pockets of those with government connections (your Siemens, T-Systems, Capgemini, Thales, etc). That's a feature, not a bug.
Imagine Dell, Zuck, Jobs, Page and Brin back in the day, waiting for handouts form the US government to fund their companies, instead of VCs. None of their companies would exist today.
Governments are only good at funding infrastructure, education, healthcare and defense projects, you can't rely on them to build you the consumer focused private tech industry the US VC industry did. It's not something achieved through central planning, and the EU refuses to get that, so it keeps throwing money into the "maybe it'll work this time" bonfire.
The US hands out money extremely generously through federal grants, DARPA and orders which have to be made to American companies through things like the Buy American Act. Silicon Valley itself was spurred by the DoD spendings.
You're ignoring my point or arguing in bad faith, since I already addressed this to the comment you're replying to.
The EU also spent a lot into defense and R&D, the difference is the US gov didn't spend money in the start-up consumer market, but they let private entrepreneurs commercialize some of the solutions that trickled down from the defense tech into the consumer sector to make money (CPUs, 3D graphics, radios, etc).
This is where the EU is deficient and you can't fill this entrepreneurial visionary void with government bureaucrats shoveling taxpayer money around to their friends.
What did DARPA have to do with Apple's success in the music and phones business? What DARPA money went into the iPod or the iPhone? They were made with commercial off the shelf chips that the likes of Nokia and Ericsson also had access to, not some super secret US DoD tech.
Just like many SV companies, Philipps, Ericsson and Nokia also were government founded from selling radars and radios to the military initially before the tech trickled to consumer. Yet Apple is now a multi trillion company(that was nearly bankrupt in the 90s) and the EU phone companies have withered away. Why is that? Is it because of "DARPA and the government"?
The U.S. spends obscene amounts of money on crap from Microsoft and Amazon and Oracle and Google.
And Amazon got off the ground from Bezos selling books online from his bedroom then pivoting to webs services, not from receiving government handouts to start a e-commerce business. These are the kind of scale-up success stories the EU lacks and can't be done thorough direct government intervention.
> Governments are only good at funding infrastructure, education, healthcare and defense projects
My point: well, the US government literally funded what became the VC landscape you seem to imply can’t be spurred by a government and still routinely fund very generously companies which then become industry behemoths.
Every new promising fields in the US is flushed with government handouts through DARPA grants, federal research grants or supplying contracts. This money then irrigates the whole fields as companies do business with each other.
It goes all the way to the VCs. Take a look at the list of the US biggest investors and see how many of them got rich through companies having the state as their biggest customer.
Heck, Siemens and Thales which you seem to despise are basically acting like dozens of American companies which are entirely funded by the DoD but on a smaller scale.
I've already addressed this point here in the comment you're replying to, but it seems people like to argue in abd faith, or jump to comment without fully reading everything. Let me copy it again here: "The US government didn't give Jobs taxpayer money to design the iPod, he had to scrape it himself wherever he could and convince people that licensing music will be the future, and it paid off big time. That's the beauty of the free market that decides which products live or die, not the government."
>Every new promising fields in the US is flushed with government handouts through DARPA grants
What did DARPA have to do with Apple's success in the music and phones business? What DARPA money went into the iPod or the iPhone? They were made with commercial off the shelf chips that the likes of Nokia and Ericsson also had access to, not some super secret US DoD tech.
Just like many SV companies, Philipps, Ericsson and Nokia also were government founded from selling radars and radios to the military initially before the tech trickled to consumer. Yet Apple is now a multi trillion company(that was nearly bankrupt in the 90s) and the EU phone companies have withered away. Why is that? Is it because of "DARPA and the government"? Come one mate.
I am lost on why you fixate on Apple or why you talk about some secret DoD tech. The DoD buys a ton of things which are not secret.
And yes, the amount of money the US spends on its companies is a significant driver in the US economy success in a way which is not dissimilar to China through with more steps involved or Europe for that matters which also does it but on lesser scale.
There is no "come on" here.
I switched sanitation to a private septic system. I bought a share of private well to avoid public water systems. I built my own roads and live in a community where all the roads are private easements so no tax money (you can drive for miles and miles without ever hitting a public road). Medicine, I made friends with a private practitioner that was educated at a private university. There are basically no police here, so I learned todefend myself. I send my kid to private school. Out of your list, the only thing I benefit from tangentially is public roads but they are way worse value than our privately funded ones (I first built mine with nothing more than a hatchet and a shovel for $0 and then later learned how to operate a backhoe).
I'm well aware I still use some public services, even if indirectly, but when I compare the costs they are all much more efficient when I have switched to private infrastucture vs trusting politicians not to squander it. My local taxes are now down to next to nothing, and when I look at what exactly I am getting for the ~30% I pay out to the state and federal the only thing I seem to be getting on ok deal on is the US navy protecting trade routes, maybe contract law courts, and nukes for mutually assured destruction.
Socialists milk the funds for their NGO friends, and likewise the center-right politicians divert the funds to their corporate backers. Two sides of the same coin.
The productivity numbers for the eu are dreadful so something needs to change.
Besides, it's screamingly obvious the US has literally chosen to pivot back to the Middle Ages, so even these captured productivity differences won't be an issue for much longer.
You did say literally so can you do a point by point comparison?
We have other people claiming the US is fascist and one of the aims of fascism was to take European culture and religion back to before the Middle Ages - they wanted to emulate the Roman Empire.
A happy, healthy society does not need to change to meet capitalist productivity goals. Consumption is killing the world, led proudly by the US.
What needs to change are the metrics we use to judge a society, because if financial success leads to the United States, that's the cautionary tale for the rest of the world, not the example.
America, the famously self-reliant giant. This has to be satire.
LOL? Is this some strange side quest started by Russian propaganda? I wish I could link it but there was a literal Russian propaganda ad showing Europeans freezing during the winter of 2022 due to no Russian gas imports... which obviously did not happen.
1. Do you realize that the Russian energy sector is screwed for good, after the start of the war? European gas imports from Russia are basically 0. And Europe has diversified, it's now importing from the US, from Qatar, from Algeria, from a lot of places. Germany built a bunch of LNG terminals in 6 months. Russian gas imports are never going back.
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_Europe...
The EU (and Europe in general) is investing like crazy in renewables. Heat pump sales are up 3 digit percentages since 5 years ago. EVs, ebikes, solar panels, wind farms, etc, etc, etc. In 20 years there will be hardly energy dependency on anyone external.
> I hope it wasn’t a temporary utopia built on the tail end of centuries of theft and violence all over the world.
You mean, just like the US theft and violence all over the world? :-)
Pot, kettle, something.
* * *
Edit: found the Russian propaganda video: https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/zuj7lx/russian_st...
Solving faraway hypotheticals in lieu of actual problems is half of the EU’s problem.
57 million UK adults getting £1000 a month (It'll leave you dying on the street in 1/3rd of the country)
Over the course of a year = £684 billion. Current total government spend is 1,278 billion
If you abolished all forms of social care including welfare, pensions, child care, disability (the lot). And education. And the NHS. you could do it providing you also dropped defence by 2/3rds.
UBI is madness.
If you are suggesting people would choose not to work if we had UBI, the evidence from trials so far is that it does not happen.
You phase it in. You start with something a little more than UC of, say £400/month for people not receiving pensions. You increase as it can be afforded. it gives people a great deal of security.
So far fewer people (37m of working age) getting less than half the amount you came up with costs. That is £278bn offset by reducing welfare spending. You would need to continue housing benefit and some others if it was that low so you could not dismantile the entire system.
> It'll leave you dying on the street in 1/3rd of the country
I doubt that - it is not a decent income, but most people would earn on top of it. That is the whole point. It would give people a greater incentive to work than the current system which reduces welfare if they earn. A lot of people will not work because they are no better off if they do.
OBR projects welfare spending to be £338bn by 29/30 anyway.
You are leaving a lot of things out. For one thing if it was taxable income (as pensions and many benefits are) tax revenues would increase too as most people would pay on it.
It would provide a huge economic stimulus which would further increase tax revenues. People on low incomes spend more of their income. Some of that would be on things with consumption taxes.
It would give people a great deal of financial security.
You cannot calculate the effects of a huge change like this on the assumption that nothing else changes.
[0] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...
The fact that a UBI which set at a rate low enough to make some existing benefit dependents would also be a generous subsidy to homeowning couples who might be able to use it to to retire a decade or two early isn't one of its strong points
AI alone is not enough to kill off all jobs. UBI isn’t coming.
All of those things can be bought. One of Europe’s strategic disadvantages vis-à-vis America and China is low availability of big, risk-taking cheque writers. Fixing that today is worth more than a working group to write a paper about a holistic solution in ten years.
The EU is getting ready to brain-drain the US.
It is not going to happen, this is just day-dreaming. Yes, I saw the news, but you can't compare a few tens of people wanting to leave the US for ideological reasons to millions of people that stay in the US because they can fare better and make more money or start new companies overnight because they have a great idea.
Let me know where you see the US military pulling back from its global footprint. How many hundreds of global bases has the US begun closing? They're expanding US military spending as usual, not shrinking. The US isn't shuttering its military bases in Europe or Asia.
The US is currently trying to expedite an end to the Ukraine v Russia war, so it can pivot all of its resources to the last target standing in the Middle East: Iran. That's anything but isolationist.
Also, the US pursuing Greenland and the Panama Canal, is the opposite of isolationist. It's expansionist-nationalistic. It's China-like behavior (Taiwan, Hong Kong, South China Sea, Tibet).
Thankfully the US is making talent flee, hopefully some of those will wash up in the old world.
And Ford makes good cars, when they choose to.
I'll give you some examples that usually stun the average Italian hence they usually stun most other people as well. You think Italy and probably think fashion but in fact the Top 10 Italian exports are (first semi-random results):
1) Machinery including computers: US$116 billion (17.2% of total exports)
2) Pharmaceuticals: $55.5 billion (8.2%)
3) Vehicles: $47 billion (7%)
4) Electrical machinery, equipment: $45.8 billion (6.8%)
5) Gems, precious metals: $25.7 billion (3.8%)
6) Plastics, plastic articles: $24.3 billion (3.6%)
7) Articles of iron or steel: $21.4 billion (3.2%)
8) Mineral fuels including oil: $19.4 billion (2.9%)
9) Optical, technical, medical apparatus: $17.4 billion (2.6%)
10) Clothing, accessories (not knit or crochet): $16.4 billion (2.4%)
In October 2019, the A320 family became the highest-selling airliner family with 15,193 orders, surpassing the Boeing 737's total of 15,136.
In 2023 the number of Airbus aircraft in service surpassed Boeing for the first time.
In any case, Spotify, SAP, Booking definitely qualify as competitive.
Unfortunately for us, Europeans, that's what happens most of the time. SAP and Spotify are the ones that got away.
Europe ranks really poorly for tech: https://companiesmarketcap.com/tech/largest-tech-companies-b...
BTW, Boeing is in the USA's top 10 exporters, it's not a minor thing.
But yeah the USA has a definite edge in software, if that's what you mean by "tech".
If you're always going to lean into risk aversion and safety nets, you will lose to the player who is willing to make more risks. This involves the losers losing bigger, but the winners winning bigger.
That's what the US is compared to Europe. The winners are better off, but the losers are worse off.
Everything is a trade off. But it's highly unlikely you can have best of both worlds in the long run.
Funding will not fix the fact that euro salaries are not even remotely competitive especially after tax. Maybe it’s better to be poor in europe than America but MLEs at large AI labs and bigtech SWEs are definitively not.
Plus, capital is somehow still more risk-averse in the EU despite the ECB's policy rate consistently running >200bps lower than fed funds. And of course the process of getting funds from the EIB remains agonizing even with this change.
Will Calviño be picking and choosing the grantees?
This is the equivalent of private equity installing someone who knows nothing but MBA material at a biotech company or a ML research company or anything else where domain expertise can actually help.
The EU is actually better at bringing in bits of "technocracy" to let industry experts lend their expertise. I don't know why they are doing that here. I think it's the wrong call.
If you're talking about the domain of startups and companies themselves though, I'll give you that
What does this mean? I can't parse it.
I think that's different to someone allocating public funds well. In my very limited experience of that in the UK, the people involved were completely unaware of what to do, and were convinced by salespeople and partisan semi-internal contractors with a bias. If Elon Musk wants to risk his own money on an internal decision at Twitter, so be it. That's a lot better than risking somebody else's money forcibly extracted from their pockets.
I answered because the guy above me complained about lack of domain expertise
Oof.
The right way to do this would have been to match private financing so the EIB is providing capital but not gatekeeping. (That or commit to giving the first N companies to reach some milestone a bunch of cheap capital.)
One person's gatekeeping is another person's stewardship and due diligence
One person’s stewardship and due diligence is another’s person’s definition of fraud wealth transfer and crime.
How long does it take to get a Series A round, and how many bureaucratic hoops do petitioners have to jump through?
Yes, that why you then buy the government and fire everybody who's investigating your many crimes. Much easier that way.
You could also insist on the manager raising a certain minimum amount of matching private sector money to "keep them honest".
Israel did this with Yozma back in the 2000s, China recently with Guidance Funds, and the US with he IRA and CHIPS Acts, so it is a model that does work.
That said, the EIB press release is very vague [0], and it appears to be a proposal right now, and still needs to be approved by EIB's Board of Governors.
Realistically, we wouldn't get a true picture of this until mid-late 2025 at the earliest (notorious European summer season is about to kick in), so there's no point speculating about this until the final version that is passed by the Board of Governers
[0] - https://www.eib.org/en/press/news/president-calvino-tech-fir...
So leave me be very skeptical about this news.
For start-ups they do a lot of online calls to ask "what do you need" though. When you say money, they are like, yeah but what do you need except money!?
That's the best case. Then there is outright fraud:
https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101092295 - European dynamic provides some project management and a wordpress-page for the lump sum of 800k€ and of course there is always "SOCIAL OPEN AND INCLUSIVE INNOVATION ASTIKI MI KERDOSKOPIKI ETAIREIA" headquartered here: https://inclusinn.com/. Probably still in stealth mode, using the 4M€ to "promote innovation".
Is cynicism about motives necessary?
I believe most people have enough self-deception and denial, that we don't need to assume fraud or theft. Similarly charities often end up being self-serving leeches - but the people seem to believe they are helping. Maybe I'm just naive? It is possible that most people in New Zealand are not so focused on intentional theft and fraud?
In New Zealand I've watched our government burn fucktons of money trying to invest in university "innovation". Academics convince politicians that they have valuable ideas, and politicians want to believe universities produce value. However the government funding is horrifically managed (no business sense) and the startups lack the right genetics and fail (even if matched funding from private investors). New Zealanders lack an entrepreneurial learning environment (maybe EU is the same): founding is difficult and really difficult if you've never watched someone close succeed.
I believe the root cause is that academics are not business/financially oriented, so the startups fail because they are not businesses. Plus the organisations picking investments are academic heavy and are not run by good capitalists. Academics often have good valuable ideas. But academics tend not to be hyper-focused just on business outcomes or they are not money focused. Business founders need to focus on profit (not status hunting, and definitely not looking for academic recognition).
I wondered for a while whether the cause was my own selection bias (startups mostly fail so I saw them fail) but I don't think that was the cause.
Also the government investing organisations love heavy handed shitty governance (and legal overcontrol bullshit). The principals believe their advice and overview is valuable. The investors put in bad CEOs and also force the businesses to make poor decisions. I've seen private VC funding make the same mistakes.
It is really sad to see good ideas get murdered by people with government money: I'm sure they believe they are helping and that they are trying to help (I'm not that cynical about motivations).
Our current government has just announced another 100 million to go towards academic startups. I just fucking wish our government would spend the budget instead by removing unnecessary red tape and to improve tax incentives (in New Zealand the incentives to grow businesses or create export income are fucked in my personal experience).
My cynical side says that it will just be politicized, so some factions can say EU/state bad, while others jump through hoops to defend it.
In contrast, private investors have more discretion and fewer stakeholders to answer to.
I’m not seeing EU grants in that list. In general I’d say anything the bureaucrats can’t ruin with their gatekeeping, friendship corruption and overvaluation of social status is a positive. Anything they can ruin they will.
* If the result is good and useful, the credit goes to the member state. * If the result isn't good, it's the fault of the EU.
Similarly how good Champaigne can only come from one place ;)
By “these” do you mean anything European, or something specific to this structure?
This very succinctly describes the entire management class here in Sweden... The public sector is run by incompetent people who have to buy consultants to do anything and the private sector is led by the same kind of people to the point where actually competent people avoid going into management. I wonder how long we can keep this up.
Procurement ("lagen om offentlig upphandling"), one of the big wins for the right, is also fundamentally broken in that a lot of the public servants involved are fresh graduates that soon gets poached by private corporations and the organisational response is to sign long term contracts with huge corporations that supply many different things and are also allowed to bring in subcontractors for the things they don't. This effectively destroys any possibility of commercial competition.
It's purposefully designed this way by conservatives.
Research departments at large corporations with the right contacts can get campaigns designed for them, more or less, which I disagree with but it's not like it fits the picture you give.
The EU also does relatively much of "startup" funding through public credit, which is nice, because bad business ideas are killed fast if they can't beg their way into years and years of burning someone else's money, which we due to the private investment sector also had some of until the 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the rate hike.
Not sure what you mean... It fits perfectly with the picture I’m trying to convey.
The person in charge is not fit to run a small coffee shop much less a 70B fund.
Or are you simply expressing the same meaningless general cynicism that is so predictably and boringly parroted whenever any government tries to do anything?
Is it even valid unless it's full names, dates of birth, addresses, bank account numbers, receipts and notarized video evidence where they explicitly admit to being corrupt?
This new 70B will come from bonds sold to EU member states. The states need to approve purchasing the bonds.
EIB earns about 3% profit. Private banks earn about twice that [2]. EIB is a non-profit organization.
EIB makes about 10% of its loans outside of the EU.
[0] https://www.eib.org/attachments/lucalli/20240237_070525_fina...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Investment_Bank#Fundi...
[2] https://www.bankingsupervision.europa.eu/press/speeches/date...
I have seen first hand, one of my classmates from high-school, whom I didn't consider to be too bright, receive a 100k EUR grant to build an esports platform that ended up being a styled-up wordpress blog. He had zero interest in tech, never programmed, the works...
He had no interest nor knowledge relating to tech, but managed to somehow get that grant. Meanwhile, I was paying taxes on hard earned freelancing dev money. We were both 23 years old at the time and it was really jarring.
I'd rather they cut taxes for already profitable small companies. The taxes in EU are astronomic.
Because then these communists wouldn't get to choose who gets the money.
What's different from the EU and US is that the US has single capital market with more unified regulations where it is much easier to pool infinite VC money into an idea. Contrary to popular belief it's actually the LACK of EU regulations that makes the EU less competitive, because a company has to deal with 20+ regulatory bodies.
In short, the EU should focus on more market integration.
On the other hand the EIB (which is anyway not directly controlled in their executive actions by the EU) can grant funds since it's kind of it's role as an investment bank
Then it would be interesting to see this % comparison with US and China. Could be strongly correlated with ROI.
The Ukrainians have done some pretty incredible stuff with very basic tools and lots of ingenuity.
Thats alot of money to spend.
If Europe wants to copy the powerhouse tech industry of the US, it's going to have to become more like the US.
NYC has this vibe of "getting stuff sone, no BS" kind of mindset. California has this relaxed vibe but at the same time the sky is the limit. I think it has something to do with how the sun shines there and the ocean. You feel like just working and things are going to be OK.
I am always more productive in NYC or LA. And I have no real explanation for that.
People here talked about Israel: the Shekel is not a currency anybody except them use, but they churn out successful startups at an incredible pace. They use their tech talent very well and are not encumbered by a myriad of regulations.
I started an incubator specifically for US based entrepreneurs looking to make the leap from what is, right now, an incredibly unstable place to build, and assist in getting both private and public funding for you, and take care of all the admin and immigration paperwork.
Come to Brussels, Belgium. It’s the most international city in the world per capita, English friendly, welcoming to expats and there’s 0% capital gains tax. It’s also human sized, you don’t need a car to get around.
Shoot me an email if you’re interested. This program was birthed right here on HN in a Who’s hiring thread. I’ve talked to 50+ founders who have had enough of the current admin and want change.
> The bank aims to process startup financing applications within six months
No good founder is waiting for 6 months. It makes absolutely no sense when VCs can make decisions in days, hours even.
The UK isn't a member of the EIB.
> No good founder is waiting for 6 months. It makes absolutely no sense when VCs can make decisions in days, hours even.
Speculation, but based on similar initiatives done in the EU in the past, it will target industrial and manufacturing vendors and suppliers (especially as this proposal is linked to KfW).
That said, no point discussing this until the final proposal actually gets presented and voted on by the Board of Governors. Most of what exists publicly is just vague press releases.
So long as the EU doesn't have their own equivalent of Index Ventures, I'm not sure an EIB style industrial policy program would have significant impact on the British startup scene.
My personal experience, having been involved with many startups in both the EU and US, is that EU government funding is completely useless for almost all startups. Why? First of all, you have to be part of the existing networks. If your business does not have university affiliations with people that get existing grants, or connections to EU bureaucracy, then you can forget about getting a dime. Then there is the risk aspect: if you are doing anything even remotely novel, or with any amount of risk, forget about it. This is not just my opinion, Mario Draghi, previous president of the ECB and Italian PM, said that the EU does not take enough risk to produce real innovation. And finally there's the timelines: from researching funding to cash in your bank account is always measured in years.
So, my expectation is that these funds will be distributed to members of the bureaucratic class and their network, for low-risk, low-reward projects, on a timescale too slow for most startups. I hope to be proven wrong, but the results of previous decades of EU funding programs do not make me optimistic.
Since it'd be obviously bad (sarcasm) if public money were spent on projects that deliver nothing or the people receiving them used them for anything other than the narrowest interpretation of the goal then you absolutely (sarcasm^2) have to have 50 different layers of checks and plans and assessment to make sure the little money is spent on the entities that lie the best. But at least no opposition politician can complain someone bought a fancier watch than they'd like or didn't deliver enough
Anyway the EIB is a different kind of funding process than EU grants and should be more effective (even just because capital doesn't come out of the EU budget or member states directly), though how much I don't know
I think a more useful description: it is an ossified structure where you have to play by the rules. Much like, say, the Catholic Church. You're not going to get a grant for your startup, or become Archbishop of Salzburg, by having an idea and sending some emails. You're going to have to fully commit yourself to the institution over a period of decades, and then you're in, and you're respected, and you can do some things, as long as they're not too revolutionary. Is that good for innovation? No. But corruption? I think it's something else.
So, then simply get in contact with your local university. It helps the university to get grants when commercial parties are involved, so this is a win-win.
I studied at an excellent Dutch university that's an EU funding darling and had plenty of connections. But because I had "just" a bachelor's degree from a top university, plus substantial relevant experience, nobody would take me seriously. Even with a master's, you will find most people think you are unserious in most "hard" fields. You often need a PhD. And then God help you if you choose to leave the existing ossified structures of academia and industry.
And then you still run up against the issues of risk tolerance (which is zero) and long timelines.
Look, the stated goal of this program is to compete with American venture capital, right? Then look at the founders who got American venture capital money. Look at how many don't even have a bachelor's! Count the number that participated in traditional structures of academia and grant-receiving corporations. Virtually none of those people would have ever gotten a dime of this money, let alone an offer to collaborate from a university.
[1] Dutch Universities spin-off terms: https://www.delftenterprises.nl/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/D...
I think this is a terrible idea, because it does not address why there is no European startup culture. Europe has tech talent and Europe has money, yet it has no start-up culture. There are many reasons for this. To me the most important ones are:
- Many EU member states have very start-up hostile labor laws. In Germany many tactics/offerings US startups use to hire talent are illegal.
- The wage difference between hard work at a startup, less hard work at a large corporation and very low stress work in a government office is minimal. Working for a startup is almost never financially rewarding.
- The mainstream social democrat conception of work, which much of the population shares, is totally at odds with American start-up culture.
Money does not solve any of these problems, because it does not answer the single most important question. Who is going to do anything with this, that is actually worthwhile. I have seen dozens of these EU funded projects and as a tech enthusiast I think many of them are exciting and cool and fun and interesting. The number of actual useful products I have seen is at zero.
Dealing with German bureaucracy is the hardest thing I have done in my life, perhaps second only to bootstrapping my business. Bureaucracy isn't a side effect of poor planning; it's tool to control individual liberties and capital, without going full communist.
For the first time, I am considering selling my business. I want Europe to succeed, but I see no way how. Any little faith I have in EU actually resides in a handful of underdogs like Estonia and Poland.
Most of that €70B is going in the pockets of bureaucrats and consultants, assuming any startup sees a dime within 3 years.
It's great.
The article doesn't give a lot of details, but the ones it does aren't inspiring confidence. A six month decision process is wildly incompatible with startup needs. EIB might be better off being limited partners in existing European VCs.
jaoane•3h ago
The opportunity of wasting the hard earned money of the citizens she means.
Have they considered doing useful stuff like removing regulations, lowering taxes, fixing the immigration mess, etc? You know, what actually made America an innovation hub.
This will end the same way it always does every time the EU gives away money to economic sectors they are jealous that the US have and they don’t: a select few will fill their pockets with nothing to show for it.
sillystu04•3h ago
From the East India Companies to Airbus, strong European companies have been made around strong European states.
bboygravity•3h ago
The East India company era had WAY less regulation all around, way lower taxes, less types of taxes, a very attractive simple investment climate (the literal founding of the concept "stock market", in its simplest and most primitive form) and close to 0 (illegal) immigration. They also had no euro, no socialist EU and no self-imposed limitations on energy conversion (there was no electricity, but wind was huge and allowed for mass production of stuff).
sillystu04•3h ago
> They also had no euro, no socialist EU and no self-imposed limitations on energy conversion (there was no electricity, but wind was huge and allowed for mass production of stuff).
These are the diseases of weak states, incapable of creating state ownership enterprises that could dominate the world.
spwa4•3h ago
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2018.001...
Btw: the East India trading company is still used in economics schools as an example of state interference in trade and what can go terribly wrong.
closewith•3h ago
An innovation hub or a capitalistic, fascistic hellscape about to collapse into itself?
> This will end the same way it always does every time the EU gives away money to economic sectors they are jealous that the US have and they don’t:
I think you are so far down the propaganda rabbit hole that you can't see the reality. Europeans do not want the US oligarchy. This move is to try to distance the bloc from the failed experiment that is the States.
missinglugnut•1h ago
The tech sector in the "fascist hellscape" is paying its workers 3-4x what Europe is, and Europe is doubling down on the policies that got it there.
>I think you are so far down the propaganda rabbit hole that you can't see the reality
You built your whole argument on a future collapse you've imagined for across the pond, rather than engaging with the topic at hand. You are the one who refuses to see.
closewith•57s ago