In the USA California, Texas, Delaware etc all have different company registration and compliance processes. This has not damaged the business environment.
It should be left to each EU country to decide how to manage their company compliance processes. Those companies can then easily trade all over the EU.
You can easily set up a company in Ireland.
The EU does not to over reach with one-size-fits-all regulations. That will eventually lead to it's dissolution. It needs to concentrate on maintaining a free trade area.
Yes you can form a company in Ireland while living in France. But you cannot get an Irish VAT number without a physical presence in Ireland.
And if – for example – France learns that you are running an Irish company from France (i.e. you have a 'permanent establishment' in France), they'll want you to file and pay French corporation tax. Which is likely sufficiently annoying that you may as well have formed a French company in the first place.
That sounds like a significant problem ... for either the Germans or the French to resolve. The only thing stopping foreign investors is law enforcement officers telling them to stop. The Germans can, literally, just not do anything except enforce basic property laws and foreign investment would pour money in.
I'm put in mind of US citizens who seem to be the lepers of international finance, often when I see prospectuses they have a lot of text on the the front saying "don't show this to anyone from the US" because they don't want to deal with the compliance costs of US law. In that case it is the US's problem and the US has an easy solution.
When people talk about larger regulatory frameworks they see the problem as the more permissive side is giving people options and want that shut down immediately. If the US started talking about global regulation to ease investment, for example, that means they don't intend to make it any easier but they do want everyone to adhere to US compliance ideas whether or not they do business in the US. It is a way for people with bad ideas to make the world worse. I'd assume the situation in Europe turns out similarly.
> That sounds like a significant problem ... for either the Germans or the French to resolve.
If you do the math on the number of pairs of EU countries that need to find bilateral solutions ... it becomes clear why the EU government exists. It's just not efficient otherwise. (Answer: 351)
> When people talk about larger regulatory frameworks they see the problem as the more permissive side is giving people options and want that shut down immediately.
Who are you talking to? People on HN and in US business, and the most popular theme in US government, is anti-regulation. I think both sides are misguided, sort of like being against or for laws - we need the right laws; sometimes we need more, less, or changes.
> US citizens who seem to be the lepers of international finance
> If the US started talking about global regulation to ease investment, for example, that means they don't intend to make it any easier but they do want everyone to adhere to US compliance ideas whether or not they do business in the US ...
Doesn't Wall Street dominate international finance? They don't seem like lepers. Also, when international financial regulation has been discussed, I think it's the US that usually undermines it. But maybe you mean something else than what I understood?
> If you do the math on the number of pairs of EU countries that need to find bilateral solutions ... it becomes clear why the EU government exists. It's just not efficient otherwise. (Answer: 351)
That logic doesn't hold. If it made sense supermarkets wouldn't work because they have to hold bilateral negotiations with hundreds of thousands of customers. In practice, they just offer a take-it-or-leave-it deal and people either accept it or they don't.
Similarly, countries offer a take-it-or-leave-it set of requirements to foreign investors. If investors aren't taking the deal, countries have the power to unilaterally renegotiate what they offer.
> Doesn't Wall Street dominate international finance? They don't seem like lepers. Also, when international financial regulation has been discussed, I think it's the US that usually undermines it. But maybe you mean something else than what I understood?
I dunno, maybe they operate out of the Caymans or something legally complicated. I'd estimate maybe 20-30% of the stock offers I see have a lot of front matter materials saying something to the effect of "if you come from the US you aren't even allowed to read this, go away". Very US-specific exclusions. Maybe the offers I get are too small time? I dunno, I just report what I see. I always chuckle at it though.
> I'd estimate maybe 20-30% of the stock offers I see have a lot of front matter materials saying something to the effect of "if you come from the US you aren't even allowed to read this, go away".
That is interesting. I wonder why. It seems like they could offer a combined prospectus that addresses all major sets of requirements. I do know that the US an (much of?) the EU use different accounting standards; maybe the numbers are for one region or the other.
> That logic doesn't hold. If it made sense supermarkets wouldn't work because they have to hold bilateral negotiations with hundreds of thousands of customers. In practice, they just offer a take-it-or-leave-it deal and people either accept it or they don't.
Has it been effective though? The EU used to have a bigger GDP than the USA in 2008 now the USA is over 50% larger. Member nations are still dragging their feet on doing much of anything in the Draghi report and it's unclear if that will ever change.
At preventing another European war? Up until very recently, pretty good. No more world wars as of yet, but 80 years has past since the last, everyone with memories of how horrible it was, are almost gone, so I guess we're building up to another one. I'm hoping that at least Europe sticks together if it gets down to it.
I'm not sure why GDP is such an important indicator to you, it's just the value of goods and services, what purpose is that supposed to serve?
USA keeps getting a larger GDP you say, yet the population at large seems to be getting poorer, education and health care gets worse, and people finding it harder and harder to find somewhere to live. So what good does a high GDP actually give you in the world today?
> USA keeps getting a larger GDP you say, yet the population at large seems to be getting poorer
People in the US may be many things but poor is not one of them. The median household income is ~$85k and the median household lives somewhere pretty inexpensive. The amount of money Americans can afford to waste on things they don't need is unmatched.
"Poor" isn't just "doesn't have N USD", purchasing power as just one example, matters so much more. But maybe it was a poor choice of words on my part, sorry.
That's what government social programs like Medicaid and SNAP/EBT are for, accounting for about 800 billion in gov spending in 2025, and a total of 1,2 Trillion the US gov spend on welfare in 2025. That's exactly the opposite of being poor. If you want to see real poverty, go to countries that don't have any government welfare programs.
In EU many workers also wouldn't be able to afford to live without taxpayer-funded government subsidies, tax credits or regulations forcing employers to not be able to pay minimum wages below a certain threshold (which is not coming out of shareholders pockets BTW but from the overall company salary budget pie, IE high earners) which also gets inflation adjusted yearly.
The lower class is always subsidised in wealthy de-industrialized western countries, since the low-skill jobs that previously could support a family, either got automated or offshored to Asia, causing a loss of worker bargaining power, so your only chance of preventing mass riots is to subsidize the lower class here and there. It's a masked UBI with extra steps.
> That's what government social programs like Medicaid and SNAP/EBT are for
Many people intend those programs to work that way, but they don't: People still can't afford food, healthcare, housing, and education. The programs are also being cut back on a large scale.
> The lower class is always subsidised
Many would say it's actually the wealthy who are subsidized. For example, most policy, laws, regulations, and both political parties are oriented toward serving and facilitating the wealthy, or at worst, not displeasing them. The military is sometimes used to serve large corporations, such as oil companies. Weathy people often pay a lower rate of taxes: The tax on their primary form of income, capital gains, is lower than the tax on other people's primary form of income, wages; the numbers get worse when you account for welfare taxes, which are regressive. People literally die of poverty - they are unable to afford the care they need.
>Many people intend those programs to work that way, but they don't
It's not as binary. It fails for some people, but it definitely works for most. There's always people slipping through the cracks of the net, even in the most generous welfare states, but that's a long stretch to claim americans are "dying of poverty" when they have an abundance of resources at their disposal to not die.
For example, if you're homeless american in a large city, you can go dumpster diving and get fresh food that's been thrown out just because it "looks ugly". If your tummy hurts, you can go to the ER and receive mandated sci-fi healthcare to not die, even if you're homeless. This is a far cry from the definition of "dying of poverty". I suggest you visit places like Russian republics, Myanmar or Nigeria if you want to see what actual dying of poverty looks like where you don't have access to free food and scifi healthcare.
The biggest problem killing americans is drug addiction and mental illnesses. Since if your brain is fried you won't be able to make much use of available free food and healthcare.
>Many would say it's actually the wealthy who are subsidized
That's always been the case since post-WW2 at least and gotten worse since Reagan. What's your suggestion to fix it? The super wealthy have too much power and influence over finance and politics, no matter who you vote for. Elected officials, on either side, will never touch them since they're in this together, so the system is working as intended, there's nothing you can fix here.
This is a commonly cited stat but it is mostly an exchange rate phenomenon that disappears when you adjust for purchase power. If you go by comparing GDP in dollars the EU recovered almost half this gap last year simply from the dollar dropping in value.
I was about to say... give dedollarization spurred by the current administration a couple more years and then compare GDP.
Being the world reserve and trade currency artificially props up the value of that currency (beyond what it would otherwise be), which has the result of artificially boosting GDP to GDP comparisons.
My point is rather than almost anything can be made smooth if you have enough $$ pointed at making it so. One of the biggest issues with small economies is that they don’t have the capital spent to make it easy to do things yet; which is friction that helps keep them small.
This is so ridiculously contrary to a Northern European existence that it's just funny. US is ridiculously more bureaucratic with lots of back office papers shuffled around by humans. US tax filing is hard to even describe to someone who never lived there.
Official procedures can be made smooth by valuing them being smooth.
You just pay. All the problems are known and have workarounds, it just involves money.
That’s my point.
It doesn’t have to be nice or clean or smooth, if there is a known solution which someone can just throw money at, at scale.
The harder problem with these smaller countries and economies, is people haven’t figured out how to do that yet. So you end up having to track down x or y random lawyer, then hope they don’t screw you, etc.
That's a very American approach. Just enable a grift economy existing purely because the original thing was bad. The Nordic approach is to make the original thing better. The end result is less wasteful.
as long as you don’t compare them to any car. teslas in 2025 belong in a museum lol
I own tesla s 2014, my neighbour has 2025, same car. tesla x was cool… in 2017. tesla 3 is like a worse looking kia and model y is like if you took tesla 3 and pumped some air in it.
If all you care about is looks, that is. Get out of any other car and you forget you can't just walk away from it and it'll shut itself off and lock the doors. I've had my Tesla driving friends drive my ICE car, and then not even turn off the engine when they go into the store because you don't need to do that with a Tesla.
> Get out of any other car and you forget you can't just walk away from it and it'll shut itself off and lock the doors.
A lot of cars have that. My (gulp) BMW EV for instance. Newer BMW ICE cars too.
But sure, some brands have had problems getting it to work for some dumb reason, recently, even the keyless entry part, which really has been a solved problem since at least the 2010s.
2025 S is the same as your 2014 S? That’s some hilarious cope. Stop lying. You know it’s completely different. Yes, a model S is still a model S. And the F150 is still a pickup truck. Surprise!
New motors, new battery pack architecture, chemistry, etc, new body structure (giga castings), new interior, new facia and body panels, new computer architecture, new door handles. It goes on and on and on. Find me a part on your 2014 that is the same on the 2025. Show it to me in the Tesla parts catalog. It’s online. Should be easy.
just asked my wife and she said the first thing she looks when she is deciding to buy a car are giga castings and facia and door handles - boom - tesla s ftw ;)
When I bought my S in 2014 people were breaking their necks checking it out, it was the shit - now this car is soooo dated there is no reason to buy 2026 vs. my 2014 (I got new DU, new battery…)
Tesla entire lineup is old outdated cars. Ford has F-150 and then another 50 models to choose from…
Exactly. Occasionally a really good well designed reliable product comes along. But then over time time it gets crappified. The only exception seems to be some open source software.
It should be left to each EU country to decide how to manage their company compliance processes. Those companies can then easily trade all over the EU.
You can easily set up a company in Ireland.
The EU does not to over reach with one-size-fits-all regulations. That will eventually lead to it's dissolution. It needs to concentrate on maintaining a free trade area.