Zerohedge;
As discussed earlier today, Germany’s economy is slowly but surely sinking, whether or not Mario Draghi’s proposal to flood Europe in new debt is eventually accepted, and nowhere is the pain more tangible than Germany’s iconic carmaker, Volkswagen, which we reported last week was considering its first-ever factory closure amid a dire economic backdrop, and which today took the shocking – for Germany – decision to end job protections for German auto workers as part of its cost-cutting push, setting up a calamitous showdown with unions as the country’s most important industry fights for its future.
This morning, the world’s largest automaker by sales canceled several agreements linked to a three-decades-old pact that was supposed to safeguard employment until 2029, V. […]
VW’s main target is its underperforming namesake passenger car brand, whose profit margins are getting squeezed amid a sputtering transition to EVs and a consumer spending slowdown. Carmakers in Europe are also struggling to compete with Tesla and new entrants from China led by BYDl, which have been selling cars at dumping prices, infuriating Brussels.
Cutbacks at VW are harder to push through than at other companies, especially since half the seats on the company’s supervisory board are held by labor representatives, and the German state of Lower Saxony — which owns a 20% stake — often sides with trade union bodies. The automaker, which employs almost 300,000 Germans, last week defended its plant closure plans, saying flagging car sales have left it with about two factories too many.
h/t MelindaPrevious.
The EV saga is one of politics and wishful thinking versus thermodynamics.
And thermodynamics isn’t for turning.
Lawmakers know they control laws, including the laws of thermodynamics.
Yeah, Walter. Back when, I think it was the Indiana State Legislature that passed a law that Pi – 3. It made it easier to calculate the area and circumference of circles.
Meanwhile Canada gives VW $13 billion of our money to subsidize EV battery production. Another addition to the herd of statist white elephants.
Who cares? The West is finished. Emigrate if you know what is good for you.
Emigrate… to where?
Biafra sounds good this time of year….bring a packed lunch.
i liked Costa Rica alot when I visited years ago. Not sure if that still would be the case.
portugal
To where?
This is the highest point of civilization, such as it is.
If you don’t have have lots of money, or ammunition, there isn’t anywhere else to go where things are much more than generally similiar.
The standard operating procedure of leftists is to bring everybody DOWN….not pull people up. It’s called crab bucket mentality.
My daughter married a Chilean and so my sister and I took a repositioning cruise from Los Angeles to Chile in December 2018. It truly is a completely different world in the southern hemisphere! Yes, there are poor countries, but Chile, Ecuador and British Guyana are considered to be first world countries. Saying that, Chile cannot afford to be a “nanny” state in which the national government does everything for you. And there were many poor people begging in certain parts of Santiago, but both my sister and I were impressed. One thing which we truly appreciated is that the countries of South America have their own entertainment stars so there was no mention of the Kardashians or any of the Hollywood elite. They could care less.
I’m off later in the year to Panama. They are developing and with the bonus of fully running the Canal (since 1999 when the US signed it over to them), they are working hard to join the developed world. They built a fully underground subway system in Panama City in 2 years. A cruise dock was added last fall and took just over 3 months to build. They are a Catholic country and haven’t (yet) let in the woke crap. Socialist dictators are not far from their memory and they don’t wish to go back down that road. And… the percentage of a certain group of troublemaking religious types is about 0.3% of the population with no intention of allowing that to grow via immigration. BTW… the immigration process is more complex to get into Panama than it is to come to Canada. They don’t want the world’s scum and they are careful about who they let in.
Thank you for this post, Big Momma
I’d Emigrate to:
Hmm Lets see where….??
Texas by way of the Mexican border maybe..??
Texas sounds good to me
The UK bailed on the EU to escape arbitrary regulation of every aspect of life like 1,000 page manuals in 23 different languages defining tomatoes. I suspect they kept all the regulation plus added more. Free industry and let it soar. We are regulating everything to death.
Kameladeeda promises to TRIM regulations!
Oh … but she means trim the regulations that demonstrate whether your business deserves a loan (read: FREE $50,000.00) … or whether you have any means by which to pay it back … err, pay it “forward”
The noose is tightening around the collective west necks. Either it’s world War for a rapid decline or it happens a bit slower economically. All the tariffs/ sanctions only compound the inevitably of this reset.
The world was at war quite some time, where it ends, we shall see what the future brings to us all
Five years ago I would have written you off as a nutter, but now it’s become clear that the US finances itself on a system, that if you want to find the “bottom turtle” holding it all up, it’s the US military. And the military is falling apart, and all we really have left is the threat that we can deliver a decapitating first strike on Moscow or Beijing, which doesn’t seem that sustainable, because with the number of engineers Russia turns out (same as US) and China, (way more) this is a use it or lose it edge. And even if we “win” a nuclear war, the loser will almost certainly destroy the ability for anybody to fly a satellite, and we will be licking our wounds ourselves for quite a while, and if the US imagines that it is going to control things across an ocean when the whole world would know that we struck first, well…
Oh, that’s right, we are goign to do it by regime change, but remember, we absolutely did not do that in Kiev in 2014 because Ukraine is the one country in the whole world where we would not do something like that!
“…especially since half the seats on the company’s supervisory board are held by labor representatives,…”
Hmmm…yeah, that’s a problem. I look forward to the Hitler downfall video memes where Adolph chastises VW execs and asks whose bright idea that was.
I bet that Germany right now is wishing that those dark nuclear power plants (I did a river cruise on the Rhine and we passed one at night, and it was ghostly) and that they still had that NG flowing in from Nordstream, half the price of LNG from North America, BTW, because one of the complaints VW has is the cost of energy is crippling their competitiveness.
Germany sacrificed its economy following orders from DC and through it’s own stupidity. When it shutdown the nukes, it could no longer afford the loss of Nordstream, they could lose one or the other, but not both, but Joe Biden says “jump,” and Germany says “how high?”
VW shares have fallen from $37.50 U.S. in mid 2021 to just over $10 today.
Lemme say this about that.
The German economy is not sinking.
May not be the best at present, though making it sinking is silly.
Economist should not use extreme language.
Vit
At the start of the Uke war, an analyst suggested that the war had several purposes, one being taking DOWN germany, by destroying their economy. As it stands, it seams to be working.
In 1st quarter 2017, VW’s sales surpassed that of Toyota.
GYM is right, it has long been the policy of first the British Empire, and then its inheritor, the US empire, to prevent an economic union of German manufacturing prowess and Russian natural resources, to prevent the rise of a rival economic colossus. This is where the term “perfidious Albion” comes from. You may not care about history, but history cares about you.
The US has dropped an economic iron curtain across Eastern Europe, cut Germany off from cheap Russian resources, and scared Sweden and Finland out of neutrality by provoking Russia to respond to what NATO has been doing in Ukraine. The US is like a pimp, and Europe are like a bunch of ho’s who need a slap every once in a while. That’s the best way to understand the current situation.
Maybe the answer is staring you right in the face when it comes to VW’s problems. Volkswagen does not have the best reputation when it comes to reliability and maintenance expenses. This from Consumers Reports:
“Our annual rankings of 34 automakers can steer you in the right direction when making a new-car purchase. These rankings are based on the average Overall Score, a combination of our road-test scores, predicted reliability and owner satisfaction data, and safety for all of the models from each automaker.”
Volkswagen placed 26th out of 34 brands. I expect this explains a lot about VW’s troubles.
“https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/cars-driving/which-car-brands-make-the-best-vehicles-a6159221985/?itm_source=parsely-api