The Market Is Not a Policy Paper
There is a foundational error running through European economic policy — one so deeply embedded that it has become invisible to the people making it. The error is this: the EU believes it can replace the consumer.
Not supplement. Not nudge. Replace. Through subsidies, mandates, CO₂ penalties, tax incentives, and regulatory coercion, European governments have constructed an elaborate system in which the state decides what consumers should want — and then builds an industrial base to supply it. The result is a continent producing goods that sell domestically under artificial conditions, that are uncompetitive globally, and that collapse the moment the subsidy cheque bounces. The consumer, meanwhile, has not changed their preferences. They have simply been overruled.
This is not a market. It is a directed economy wearing the costume of one.
There is a phrase that market economists have repeated for centuries because it remains stubbornly, inconveniently true: the consumer is the market. Not the regulator. Not the subsidy committee. Not the Commission's DG GROW. The person standing in the dealership with their own money, making a calculation about what is the most economical, the most reliable, the most practical vehicle for their needs — that person is the market. Every attempt to override that calculation with policy creates a distortion. And every distortion has a cost.
The EV Illusion
The electric vehicle transition in Europe is the purest expression of this dynamic. Governments offered massive purchase subsidies — France spent €1.5 billion in 2024 alone, Germany ran its Umweltbonus at €2.4 billion in its final year, Italy launched a scrappage scheme worth nearly €800 million. The signal to automakers was unambiguous: retool your factories, build EVs, the demand is there.
So they did. Volkswagen converted its Brussels plant to produce the Q8 e-tron. Volvo invested €200 million to add EX30 production at its Ghent facility. Billions were committed to battery production — all in response to what appeared to be a booming market.
But the demand was not real. It was a policy artefact.
When Germany cut its subsidies at the end of 2023, BEV registrations collapsed. The Audi Brussels plant, designed for 120,000 vehicles per year, never produced more than 47,900 in its best year. By 2024, worldwide Q8 e-tron deliveries had fallen to just 28,200. Audi shut the plant entirely in February 2025 — erasing 3,000 jobs and 76 years of Belgian automotive history. The closure cost €1.6 billion. The plant did not fail because the workers were incompetent. It failed because the product — a premium electric SUV starting around €70,000 — was one that governments wanted consumers to buy, not one that consumers actually wanted.
Meanwhile, the EU's tariffs on Chinese EVs — up to 45% on some manufacturers — are not protecting European consumers. They are denying them access to affordable electric vehicles while European manufacturers close European factories and shift production to Mexico, China, and wherever the economics actually work. Audi had planned to move Q8 e-tron production to Mexico before cancelling the model entirely. Volvo's EX30, now produced in Ghent, was originally manufactured in China — the Belgian plant was added as a hedge against tariff politics, not because Belgium offered a competitive production environment.
The EU is not building an export powerhouse. It is building a protected domestic market for products that cannot survive outside it. These cars do not compete in Korea. They do not compete in Japan. They struggle in the United States, where Trump's 25% tariff on foreign vehicles has effectively locked European EV exports out of the market. New car registrations in the EU remain roughly 20% below pre-pandemic levels. The consumer has not chosen. The consumer has been cornered.
The headline numbers look impressive — BEV new-sales share reached 19% in 2025 — but the fleet tells the real story. The EU has 260 million registered passenger cars. Battery-electric vehicles account for roughly 2.2% of them. Corporate fleets drive 62% of new registrations and 89% of BEV purchases. When private individuals spend their own money, just 10% choose electric. And the moment governments tax EVs like normal cars — which they must, because the fiscal hole from lost fuel excise is already billions — the running cost advantage evaporates entirely, even for home chargers in Belgium.
Audi Forest is not an anomaly. It is the template.
Prohibition by Taxation
When subsidies fail to produce the desired consumer behaviour, the EU's fallback is more direct: make the undesired choice so expensive that it ceases to be a choice at all. The state layers taxes until the price of non-compliance exceeds what any normal household can bear. The effect is prohibition. The mechanism is taxation. The camouflage is always environmental protection.
France's malus écologique is the most extreme example. Any new car emitting more than 113 grams of CO₂ per kilometre triggers a penalty — starting at €50 and rising steeply. A family car at 154 g/km faces over €4,000. A modest SUV or a vehicle with a 2.0-litre engine easily incurs €10,000–€20,000 in penalty tax before the buyer has turned the key. The maximum penalty reached €70,000 in 2025, will rise to €80,000 in 2026, and hits €90,000 by 2027. On top of this, France applies a separate malus masse — a weight-based penalty — from 1,500 kg in 2026, adding thousands more for any car above compact size. By 2027, 80% of all new cars sold in France will be subject to one or both penalties, up from 40% in 2023. Even a Renault Clio — France's best-selling car — now incurs €170–€210.
This is not a carbon tax in any economically rational sense. A carbon tax prices emissions at a uniform rate and lets the market adjust. The malus is a punitive progressive tariff designed to make specific products unaffordable — a prohibition that stops short of the word. A family that needs a seven-seat vehicle, a tradesman who requires a van-sized car, a rural household without charging infrastructure — none of these people have done anything wrong. They have simply been priced out of the market by a state that has decided their needs are incompatible with its climate targets.
France's DPE housing ban follows the same logic. Since January 2025, any property rated G on the energy performance certificate is illegal to rent. F-rated from 2028. E-rated from 2034. Over 500,000 properties are affected nationally, including 90,000+ apartments in Paris alone. Landlords who cannot afford €20,000–€50,000 renovations are forced to sell at a discount or leave properties vacant. The rental market, already in acute shortage, loses supply. Rents rise for the properties that remain. Tenants — the people the regulation was designed to protect — face higher costs and fewer options. Meanwhile, the sold properties are purchased by wealthier buyers who can afford the renovation, or by investors who convert them to short-term tourist rentals. The housing stock does not improve. It simply changes hands — from those who cannot afford the state's demands to those who can.
The pattern repeats across the continent. The Netherlands applies a BPM registration tax based on CO₂ emissions that can add €15,000–€25,000 to the price of a car with a 2.5-litre engine — making it effectively unaffordable for the middle class while remaining a rounding error for the wealthy. Belgium layers registration taxes, road taxes, and benefit-in-kind calculations that make non-EV company cars progressively punitive. In every case, the mechanism is the same: the state does not ban the product — it imposes a cost so disproportionate that the effect is indistinguishable from a ban, while preserving the bureaucratic fiction of consumer choice. The citizen remains technically free to buy the car. They simply cannot afford the €70,000 tax that comes with it. The tenant remains technically free to rent the apartment. The landlord is simply forbidden from offering it.
This is what consumer replacement looks like when subsidies are not enough: first you incentivise, then you penalise, then you raise the penalties until they become prohibition — all while claiming nobody has been prohibited from doing anything.
The Voucher Economy
Belgium has taken consumer replacement to its bureaucratic extreme. Start with company cars — not a perk but a policy instrument. The government decides which vehicles qualify for the most generous benefit-in-kind treatment, effectively steering hundreds of thousands of vehicle choices per year through the tax code rather than the market. The deductibility of combustion-engine company cars is being phased to zero by 2028, forcing the corporate fleet toward electrification on a political timetable. Then meal vouchers — €8 per working day, spendable only at approved food retailers. Eco-cheques — up to €250 per year, only on "ecological" products: LED bulbs, organic food, bicycles. Sport and culture budgets — funds redeemable only for gym memberships, theatre tickets, museum entry. None of this is wages. None of it is freedom. Each is a directed spending channel, converting what would otherwise be fungible income into constrained tokens flowing only into state-approved categories.
The Belgian worker does not receive a salary. They receive a portfolio of non-fungible vouchers, each with its own rules, expiration dates, eligible merchants, and spending caps — administered by a private bureaucracy of voucher issuers (Edenred, Sodexo, Monizze) that extracts commissions on every transaction. An entire parasitic industry exists to manage the complexity that the state created by refusing to simply pay people in money.
France runs the largest meal voucher system in Europe — nearly six million workers on titres-restaurant, injecting €9.4 billion per year through a mechanism so baroque that parliament spent all of 2024 debating whether workers should be allowed to buy pasta with their lunch vouchers. The four dominant operators were collectively fined €414 million in 2019 for price-fixing. A cartel. In the meal voucher industry. Beyond meal vouchers, France layers on chèque-vacances (holiday vouchers), CESU (service vouchers), and the Pass Culture — a €300 government credit for 18-year-olds, spendable only on approved cultural goods.
Italy took the model to its logical extreme with the Superbonus 110% — a tax credit that exceeded renovation costs. Initial projections: €30 billion. Actual disbursements: €120 billion+. Scaffolding prices rose 400%. As former Prime Minister Draghi observed, the programme "eliminates the incentive to negotiate on price" — because when the government pays 110%, there is no price discipline. There is only extraction.
And the voucher economy has generated its own parasitic technology sector. Edenred — the French company that operates Ticket Restaurant — reached a €15.2 billion market capitalisation when it joined the CAC 40 in June 2023, and employs 12,000 people across 45 countries. (It has since been ejected from the index as its valuation collapsed to roughly €4.5 billion — but the workforce remains.) In 2024, the company processed nearly €45 billion in transaction volume. Sodexo spun off its benefits division into Pluxee, another publicly traded company. Swile raised $200 million from SoftBank to build a sleeker app for… spending your meal vouchers.
The productivity comparison is devastating. Stripe employs 10,000 people to process $1 trillion in payment volume — serving millions of businesses in 46 countries, enabling commerce from Brooklyn to Bangalore. Edenred employs 12,000 people to process €45 billion — routing government-designed meal vouchers through a closed-loop network that exists only because four European countries decided workers cannot be trusted to buy their own lunch. Stripe enables markets. Edenred administers the replacement of markets. The technical skills are identical. The economic output is incomparable. One produces a globally exportable product. The other produces a closed-loop compliance tool that would cease to exist the moment the underlying regulation is repealed.
The United States does not have a meal voucher industry. It has a $300 billion SaaS market — cloud-based software designed from day one for global export. A single company — Salesforce, with over 80,000 employees — generates more global revenue than the entire European meal voucher industry combined. The American model converts human capital into globally exportable intellectual property. The European model converts a disproportionate share of its human capital into domestically consumed administrative overhead. One compounds. The other costs. And the gap between them — European GDP per capita now roughly a third lower than the United States in PPP terms, per the Draghi Report — grows wider every year.
The total workforce employed in administering state-created economic complexity across the major EU economies — voucher issuers, payroll secretariats, fleet management companies (ALD/Ayvens: 15,000+ employees; Arval: 7,500+), subsidy consultants, and compliance officers — is plausibly 300,000–500,000 workers. Germany alone has over 100,000 tax advisors — a density unmatched anywhere in the world. Yes, Europe still has ASML, SAP, Siemens, the Fraunhofer institutes — nobody disputes that. But for every ASML engineer advancing EUV lithography, there are dozens of equally talented developers building meal voucher apps. This is what passes for a growth industry in Europe.
The K-Shaped Car Market
The average passenger car on EU roads is now 12.3 years old — up from 10.9 in 2013 and rising every year. The new car market has never recovered from the pandemic. In France, growth in the used car market is driven almost entirely by private-to-private sales of older vehicles — cars over 15 years old recorded double-digit growth in 2025, with nearly three million transactions between private sellers. In Germany, the used car market remains 10% below 2019 levels while average asking prices have risen 34.5%. Across the continent, middle-income buyers are not switching to EVs. They are not switching to anything. They are holding onto their old cars because the new ones are too expensive, the incentives are designed for corporate fleets, and the state has priced them out of the market it claims to be building for them.
The result is a K-shaped transition. Corporate fleets, subsidised by the tax code, churn through expensive new EVs every three years, feeding the fleet management industry and inflating the headline BEV statistics. Private buyers, taxed at confiscatory rates on their income and priced out of the new car market, drive ageing combustion vehicles and trade them among themselves. Despite battery-electric cars capturing 15% of new registrations, EVs represent just 1.2% of all cars actually on EU roads. The green transition exists in the statistics. On the roads, Europe still runs on petrol and diesel — it just runs on older and older engines.
Germany's Kurzarbeit tells the same story in a different sector. The short-time work scheme — which subsidises wages when companies reduce hours — is celebrated as a labour market miracle. But it has an insidious long-term effect: it prevents the creative destruction that reallocates labour from declining industries to growing ones. Germany has now experienced three consecutive years of contraction and stagnation. Industrial output has fallen continuously. Yet unemployment remains low. This is not resilience — it is Kurzarbeit masking the rot. Workers who should be retraining or moving into higher-productivity sectors are instead working three-day weeks in automotive plants that produce fewer cars each quarter. The labour market looks healthy on paper. The economy tells a different story.
The Brussels Effect That Wasn't
And the Brussels Effect that was supposed to justify all of this — the theory that EU standards would become global standards, forcing the world to adopt European rules because it was cheaper than running dual systems — has failed to materialise. India's data protection law diverged from GDPR. Brazil scrapped its DMA-style bill, choosing the lighter-touch Japanese and UK approach instead. Japan chose to "avoid excessive regulation." The US has no federal privacy law. The SEC abandoned climate disclosure requirements in 2025. The EU's own CSRD was scaled back via the Omnibus proposal. In climate and trade policy, the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism has generated friction rather than adoption.
The world has choices — and it is making them. The EU's shrinking share of global GDP means its market gravity is weakening at precisely the moment its regulatory ambition is expanding. Europe's regulatory standards are not becoming global standards. They are becoming European standards — applied in a shrinking economic zone, increasing costs for European consumers and businesses, and creating a compliance moat that protects no one because the competitors are not trying to enter the moat. They are building on the other side of it.
The products Europe mandates — expensive EVs built to EU-specific specifications, heavily regulated AI systems, CSRD-compliant supply chains — sell primarily in Europe, subsidised by European taxpayers, purchased by European consumers who have fewer alternatives because the state has regulated many of them out of existence. That part of the economy is not a market. It is a terrarium — a closed ecosystem, artificially maintained, disconnected from the conditions of the outside world.
And here is the deeper strategic error that European leaders refuse to confront: free trade benefits the most competitive player. When you open your market to a competitor that has spent two decades building ports, roads, and factories across client states, that produces at lower cost and increasingly at higher quality, that subsidises its champions with a directed industrial strategy while you subsidise yours with meal vouchers — free trade does not produce mutual benefit. It produces transfer.
The numbers are stark. The EU's goods trade deficit with China hit €306 billion in 2024 — with 97% of imports consisting of manufactured goods, led by machinery, vehicles, and electrical equipment. Bruegel predicts the deficit will reach €400 billion in 2025. Goldman Sachs estimates that without Chinese competition, German GDP growth in 2025 would have been 0.5% instead of 0.2%. And the goods flowing in are no longer cheap toys and textiles. They are €97 billion in electrical machinery, €61 billion in telecommunications equipment, €46 billion in computers. China now dominates the categories that were supposed to be Europe's industrial heartland.
In Australia — a free-trade economy with no tariffs on Chinese vehicles — Chinese brands captured 24% of the new car market in early 2026, up from 1.7% in 2019. 77% of all EVs sold in Australia in 2025 were made in China — even ones from non-Chinese brands. This is what an open market looks like when a more competitive producer enters it: the incumbents do not adapt. They are displaced.
Every successful late-industrialiser understood this. South Korea protected its auto and electronics industries behind tariff walls for decades before opening them to competition — and did so only when Hyundai and Samsung were strong enough to win. China's entire economic miracle was built on selective openness. Europe is doing the opposite. It is the less competitive player advocating for maximum openness — higher manufacturing costs, energy prices double the American level, rigid labour markets, crushing tax burdens, and hundreds of thousands of workers diverted into administrative overhead.
The Schizophrenic Bloc
Even the governments building this system do not believe in it — not when their own interests are at stake.
The FCAS — the €100 billion Future Combat Air System, Europe's flagship joint defence programme — was supposed to prove that the bloc could deliver strategic autonomy through industrial integration. Instead, it has become the proof of the opposite. Dassault and Airbus have been locked in a public war over workshare and intellectual property for years. France's defence minister told the press that "Germany today does not have the ability to build an aircraft." In March 2026, Macron and Merz postponed a decision — again — launching "one final mediation" that nobody expects to succeed. The fighter jet may be scrapped entirely, leaving only the combat cloud — a fighter programme without the fighter, the perfect metaphor for European integration.
And just as IRIS² — the EU's 290-satellite constellation, billed as Europe's answer to Starlink — was supposed to demonstrate collective digital sovereignty, Germany quietly began developing a separate ~100-satellite military constellation with Rheinmetall, OHB, and Airbus for the Bundeswehr. The European Parliament's own security committee warned it "risks weakening European structures." Berlin did not appear to care.
Some are now floating the idea of an "Europe of Six" — France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, and the Netherlands — that would push ahead on defence and industrial integration without waiting for unanimity among 27. The proposal tells you everything about the state of the union: the answer to the bloc's dysfunction is not to fix it, but to build a smaller bloc within it — and presumably impose a new layer of rules on an even more select group, while the leaders of those countries continue to exempt themselves from the old ones.
European leaders have become schizophrenic. They advance the EU when they believe the bloc can better compete and fight together, but simultaneously look to circumvent it whenever they can — always framing the bypass as an exception. But normal citizens cannot go around the bloc the way politicians do. The same officials who mandate electric vehicles for citizens drive petrol BMWs — hybrid, they insist, and they need the range because they drive a lot, they explain, as though ordinary people do not. Integration, in practice, means that the rules are mandatory for the governed and optional for the governors. This is not a union. It is a hierarchy — one that demands ever-deeper commitment from its subjects while its architects demonstrate, project after failed project, that they themselves are unwilling to commit.
There is a logical endpoint to this dynamic, and Volkswagen is arriving at it in real time. Europe's largest automaker — having closed its Brussels factory, shed thousands of jobs, and watched its EV strategy collide with consumer reality — is now in discussions with Rafael Advanced Defense Systems about converting its Osnabrück plant to produce components for Israel's Iron Dome missile defence system. Production could begin within 12 to 18 months. This is a company that defined mass-market consumer mobility for seven decades, acknowledging that it can no longer profitably sell cars to Europeans and pivoting to government defence contracts instead. In a continent where fiscal expansion is the only growth strategy and rearmament is the only spending category with political consensus, selling to the state is simply easier than selling to people.
The consumer-replacement model has an older, quieter cousin in pharmaceuticals. For decades, European governments have aggressively suppressed drug prices — Italy capping hospital spending and clawing back €2 billion from pharma companies, the UK's industry payments jumping nearly 450% in a decade, France maintaining rigid reference pricing. The result: the US now accounts for an estimated 70 to 80 percent of global pharmaceutical R&D funding. Europe did not invest in building its own innovation ecosystem — it invested in mechanisms to extract cheaper drugs from someone else's. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla captured the dilemma at the 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference: "Shall we reduce the US price to France's level, or stop supplying France?" This is not a hypothetical. It is the logical consequence of treating pharmaceutical companies as utilities to be squeezed rather than enterprises to be incentivised.
The Knowledge Problem
Step back and the pattern is unmistakable. In sector after sector, EU policy follows the same arc: the state identifies a desired outcome, constructs a subsidy-and-mandate architecture to force it into existence, industry redirects productive capacity toward the mandated categories, and the resulting products are uncompetitive globally, dependent on continued state support, and disconnected from what consumers would freely choose. When the support falters — as it must, given Europe's deteriorating fiscal position — the demand collapses, the factories close, and the investment is written off.
Friedrich Hayek explained why this experiment would fail — eighty years before Brussels tried it.
In The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945), Hayek identified the central deficiency of all planned systems: the knowledge required to coordinate an economy does not exist in concentrated form. It is dispersed across millions of individuals, each possessing fragments of information about their own circumstances — their preferences, constraints, alternatives, and local conditions — that no central authority can aggregate. The price system is the mechanism through which this dispersed knowledge is communicated. Prices are not numbers on a screen. They are information — compressed signals that coordinate the decisions of strangers across time and space without anyone directing the process. When the state replaces prices with subsidies, mandates, and penalties, it does not merely distort incentives. It destroys information. The signal that would have told Audi nobody wanted a €70,000 electric SUV was drowned out by the subsidy — until the plant closed at €1.6 billion. The signal that would have told French landlords how to allocate capital was overridden by a DPE rating that turned 500,000 properties into unlettable assets overnight. The signal that would have told European pharmaceutical companies where to invest was suppressed by price controls that made the investment irrational — so the investment went to America instead.
The two-tier car market is not an "awareness gap." It is millions of consumers weighing range anxiety, charging infrastructure, total ownership costs, resale uncertainty, and arriving at a conclusion the state refuses to accept. The rising fleet age is not a communication failure. It is a price signal. The boom-bust plant cycle is not bad luck. It is investment made on the basis of political signals rather than market ones.
The penalties breed exactly the perverse outcomes Hayek's framework predicts. The DPE rental ban does not improve French housing — it creates shortages, drives up rents, and transfers property from those who cannot afford the mandated renovations to wealthier investors who can. The malus écologique does not reduce emissions — it prices middle-income families out of the new car market and pushes them into older, less efficient vehicles. The voucher economy does not empower workers — it spawns a rent-seeking bureaucracy of 12,000 Edenred employees, €414 million cartel fines, and parliamentary debates about whether lunch money can be spent on uncooked fish. Every intervention creates a new complexity. Every complexity creates a new industry to administer it. The waste is not a side effect of the system. It is the system.
And the system is running out of runway. EU member states spent €228 billion on state aid in 2022 alone. Since Brussels relaxed state aid rules in March 2022, Germany and France together have accounted for 77% of the €672 billion in approved extraordinary aid — Germany alone securing €356 billion (53%), France €161 billion (24%). The remaining 24 member states collectively shared less than 12%. Two countries — representing roughly a third of EU GDP — captured three quarters of the bloc's crisis-era subsidies. This is not a common market. It is a subsidy tournament in which the largest treasuries win by default. Europe's debt dynamics — France at 118% of GDP, Belgium at 107%, Italy at 137% with interest payments consuming 4% of GDP — leave no fiscal space for the endless cheques the consumer-replacement model requires.
Hayek warned that the planner's greatest danger is not malice but confidence — the sincere belief that concentrated expertise can substitute for dispersed knowledge. Europe's planners are not corrupt. But neither are they brilliant — and this is precisely the point. Nobody is. No committee, no directorate-general, no expert panel possesses the information that a functioning price system processes automatically. Yet they have constructed one of the most sophisticated regulatory architectures in human history, staffed it with well-credentialed civil servants, housed it within institutions of genuine democratic legitimacy — and produced an economy that cannot build a car its citizens want to buy, cannot rent an apartment to the tenants who need one, cannot develop the drugs its patients require, and cannot generate the growth its debts demand.
The consumer-replacement experiment has run its course. The data is in. The factories are closed. The fleet is ageing. The rental market is shrinking. The productivity gap is widening. The talent is debugging voucher code. The only question that remains is the one Hayek posed in 1945: will the planners accept the verdict of dispersed knowledge — or will they, once again, plan harder?
Europe's track record suggests the answer.
What the Consumer Actually Says
On March 23, 2026, L'argus — France's leading automotive publication — posted a story headlined "European automotive trade tips into deficit with China." 161 comments in 48 hours. Almost uniformly furious. Not at China. At Brussels.
"China now makes some of the best cars in the world — ultra high-tech, premium and even luxury. Their interest in big German engines is gone. It's not tariffs that will change anything. We shouldn't have fallen asleep for 20 years — but we all did." — Mathieu H.
"Who outside the EU wants electric cars? The Chinese and Americans are further ahead. All we can do is watch, powerless, as Brussels and the Greens massacre the auto industry." — Pierre B.
"When the malus on a little Yaris GR can reach €70,000 — the bonus-malus is an aberration, just like the diktat of forcing electric on us." — Nick B.
"My last Citroën — engine dead at 75,000 km. Stellantis will never see me again." — Gilles D.
"Cars too expensive, fuel too expensive, Chinese and Korean cars with equal or superior reliability to old Europe, with better warranties. Not surprised." — Jean Michel P.
"I bought my Sandero new 11 years ago for €14,800 — today the same car costs almost €21,000. If my car gives out, I'll buy second-hand." — René Y.
"A magnificent industrial suicide on a European scale! Bravo to our genius economists, our incompetent politicians, the stupid eco-fundamentalists. Europe is committing a masterful hara-kiri." — Michel C.
And then — inevitably — the voice of the planner:
"Obviously — by constantly rejecting the logical evolution toward electric mobility, we end up having to go buy our electric vehicles from China." — Jean-Claude H.
Jean-Claude's comment deserves attention, because it is the authentic voice of the regulatory mindset. The factories have closed. The trade balance has flipped. The consumers are revolting. The fleet is ageing. And the diagnosis is: we did not regulate hard enough. If only the transition had been faster, the mandates stricter, the penalties higher — then the consumer would have complied, the industry would have adapted, and Europe would be leading. The evidence to the contrary — every data point in this article — is dismissed as a failure of execution, never of concept.
This is the consumer-replacement experiment in miniature. 160 people screaming that the policy has failed. And one person, speaking the language of the institution, explaining that it hasn't failed — it simply hasn't been tried properly yet.
Disclaimer
Please note that Benchmark does not produce investment advice in any form. Our articles are not research reports and are not intended to serve as the basis for any investment decision. All investments involve risk and the past performance of a security or financial product does not guarantee future returns. Investors have to conduct their own research before conducting any transaction. There is always the risk of losing parts or all of your money when you invest in securities or other financial products.
Credits
Photo by Guillaume Périgois / Unsplash.
