Fabian Schmidt

@fabschmidt.bsky.social

1156 Followers 774 Following

Political economist // Industrial policy for future // Brussels // Rail ultra

Fuck Nuance by Kieran Healy
About 20 minutes later, roughly eight police officers in plain clothes surrounded us and pulled us out of the event. None of them wore visible identification, only flashing a badge for a short enough time to not register. When we first asked who they were, they physically pushed us, said “we are police” and to come with them immediately. For the next 15 minutes or so, the officers confiscated our IDs and questioned us. They asked whether The European Correspondent had a political leaning, whether we had an agenda, and how we had got into the event (that the American embassy invited us to).
Sickos meme
So what to do, apart from not starting from here? Even apparent solutions like precautionary stockpiling of critical minerals have problems. China’s rare earths export controls regime requires end-user licences, enabling Beijing to withhold sales from any buyer it suspects of insulating itself against coercion. China really has thought this through very well.
There is one newish policy tool that does deserve greater space in the European toolbox: using public procurement to create markets, as Luc Frieden, prime minister of Luxembourg, rightly argued in a speech last week. The public sector makes up a sizeable chunk of demand in Europe’s economies. On top comes private activity that enjoys public subsidies. Both are tools that should be used much more consciously to reserve predictable markets for made-in-Europe digital tech. Military and sensitive public data processing and research and development are obvious places to start — for security reasons, but also to let companies invest in the expectation that they will be able to sell.
One solution for Europe’s underutilised factories is to seek Chinese partners to fill spare capacity at home. Stellantis has said it intends to make Dongfeng’s high-end EVs at a plant in Rennes, north-west France, that is currently operating at about half its capacity, while Opel, another Stellantis brand, plans to produce an electric SUV in Spain using Chinese partner Leapmotor’s motor and battery technology.
Responding to the court ruling, CHP Deputy Chairman Gokan Zeybek said "all decisions taken by courts acting on instructions [from the government] are null and void as far as we are concerned. "Now we are going to Ankara. We are going to stand up for our headquarters, the headquarters entrusted to us by the nation, entrusted to us by the organisation," he said, according to Medyascope. Kilicdaroglu, however, indicated his willingness to take up his former role again. "May this decision be beneficial to Turkey and CHP," he told TGRT news.
Buch: Forging Global Fordism: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Contest over the Industrial Order Stefan J. Link A new global history of Fordism from the Great Depression to the postwar era
Peak 2025 snow cover was the third lowest in the 42-year record
Fertility falling of a cliff, across countries, after smartphones take off
The decline of long-term relationships has been steepest among people without a degree % of 25- to 34-year-olds in couples, by education UK US Degree orhigher Degree orhigher Belowdegree Belowdegree Source: FT analysis of UK Household Longitudinal Study, UK Family Resources Survey and US Current Population Survey FT graphic: John Burn-Murdoch / @jburnmurdoch ©FT
Mexico‘s birth rate falling under the US one
FT graph showing rising Chinese FDI in European countries, especially Hungary, Serbia, Spain
Graphs for different products from cables to wind turbines
Involution is just one of the ways in which this “waste” can be manifested. And if the problem is systemic, rather than specific to a few isolated and idiosyncratic sectors, there are only two ways to resolve overcapacity at the systemic level: Increase demand faster than growth in industrial capacity. This requires boosting household consumption, which in turn requires implicit or explicit income and wealth transfers—either from the central and local governments, or from businesses and manufacturers—to the household sector. But this has proven difficult. Cut capacity to bring it line with domestic demand. In the short term this means closing factories, laying off workers, and accepting slower growth. But this clashes with Beijing’s determination to maintain employment stability and meet GDP growth targets.
Cutting capacity in selected areas will almost certainly reduce involution in those sectors, but it doesn’t address the original problem created by the sharp fall in property investment. If China cuts investment in the worst-hit areas, total investment growth in China will decline, and this will feed directly into a decline in GDP growth and a rise in unemployment.
Post-Fordism was in crisis, but what would take its place? A range of competing visions and frameworks have been proposed. We have heard of state capitalism, disaster capitalism, platform capitalism, chokepoint capitalism, vulture capitalism, spiderweb capitalism, archipelago capitalism, asset manager capitalism, surveillance capitalism, and even crack-up capitalism. Theorists have suggested that we live in an age of neofeudalism, techno-feudalism, techno-libertarianism, techno-authoritarianism, techno-populism, techno-fascism, end times fascism, neofascism, neoliberal fascism, post-neoliberalism, paleo-populism, neopatrimonialism, hyperpolitics, and geoeconomics.
There is a social value to repurposing our existing infrastructure towards new aims. In every community there should be hopes of engineers who can convert infrastructure to suit the changing needs of those communities. There are all kinds of things that people need or that could replace imports or that could be used for the environment. Every municipality has projects that they want to run that are sitting on their shelf. We need to be asking ourselves whether the facilities can be adjusted and people trained to support changing needs. If we don’t seriously take on such questions, restructuring will continue to take place in an undemocratic, unplanned way geared toward profit maximization.
Graph showing EV uptake has grown significantly between 2018 and 2025, in particular in Asian countries
Graph
Rue de la Loi separating Council and Commission.
And if the issue does come up, if there’s one thing officials at the European Commission are really good at — maybe better than anyone else on earth — it’s bureaucratic delay and obfuscation. Maybe at some point big, strong European men with tears in their eyes will meet with Trump and say, “Sir, we have a temporary hangup over clause #14159 of the 1986 Single European Act. But we’ll get it cleared up any day now.”
China paces ahead in electrification, while Europe and the US flatline
The South Korean supplier to General Motors and Tesla on Monday estimated its operating profit for April to June to be Won492bn ($360mn), up 152 per cent from year earlier. Excluding the so-called advanced manufacturing production credit, second-quarter operating profit would be just Won1.4bn, LGES estimated
Photo of relevant page from Thamer: ‚Zweite Karrieren‘
Sweden and Switzerland: Share of EVs flattens out in both countries, hybrids still enjoy dynamic growth in Switzerland
I actually don’t like the phrase “state capacity,” even though I use it all the time, because it’s really the fusion of public and private power. That’s what we see creating the capacity to push through the funding and regulatory space, the changes in property rights that make it possible to have growth. All of that requires some degree of conscious, stable policymaking on the part of state actors, which means they need to be talking to people who are actually in the industry.
“An electric car doesn’t produce any nitrogen oxide pollution, but that doesn’t mean that an electric car is not producing particles,” said Tobias Wolf, the city’s chief engineer of air quality. “Our true problems are PM 10 and PM 2.5,” he said, referring to fine particulate matter that can settle deep within the lungs and even pass into the bloodstream.
Butterfly meme: German government seeing US top academics "Is this infrastructure?"
It was surreal listening to my friends recount everything they had done to get me out: working with lawyers, reaching out to the media, making endless calls to detention centers, desperately trying to get through to Ice or anyone who could help. They said the entire system felt rigged, designed to make it nearly impossible for anyone to get out. The reality became clear: Ice detention isn’t just a bureaucratic nightmare. It’s a business. These facilities are privately owned and run for profit. Companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group receive government funding based on the number of people they detain, which is why they lobby for stricter immigration policies. It’s a lucrative business: CoreCivic made over $560m from Ice contracts in a single year. In 2024, GEO Group made more than $763m from Ice contracts. The more detainees, the more money they make. It stands to reason that these companies have no incentive to release people quickly. What I had experienced was finally starting to make sense.
Illustration showing different parts of the F-35B variant coming from European suppliers
Söder
Buch: Die Ökonomie des Alltagslebens. Für eine neue Infrastrukturpolitik
Graph So ist die Zahl der Sozialwohnungen seit 2017 gesunken Über 200.000 Sozialwohnungen sind bundesweit verschwunden, nur im Osten gab es neue.
FT graph showing industrial production and manufacturing capacity use over time.
2014: top 5 DAX firms are Bayer, Mercedes-Benz, Siemens, BASF, Allianz