Latest news with #MarioDraghi
Business Times
6 days ago
- Business
- Business Times
Europe moves on from economic 'peak pessimism'
JANUARY'S 2025 World Economic Forum in Davos is sometimes seen as the moment that 'peak pessimism' reigned about Europe's future economic and political performance. Yet, fast forward to today and expectations for the region's prospects have improved significantly since. To be sure, Europe continues to have many challenges. However, the mood music has flipped, at a minimum, from 'glass half empty' to 'glass half full'. On Thursday (June 5), for instance, the European Central Bank (ECB) is widely expected by economists to cut interest rates for what would be the eighth time in a little more than a year. This would see the ECB diverge further from the recent path of the US Federal Reserve, which has had rates on hold in 2025. Other central banks in the region have also cut rates too. This includes the Bank of England which has made four cuts of a full percentage point since a peak last year of 5.25 per cent. Yet, it is not just this stimulus from monetary policy that has helped change perceptions of the economic and political outlook for the region. In Europe's largest economy, the new German government has surprised on the upside, despite its erstwhile shaky start in office, with reform of the so-called constitutional balanced budget amendment or debt brake. This could see over one trillion euros of additional spending in the next decade. Moreover, wider supply side reforms could lift the economy further in the next four years of Friedrich Merz's chancellorship. Further, there has also been a resurgence in the European trade liberalisation agenda. Last December, the EU agreed on a big deal with the Mercosur bloc, and it is chasing down agreements with a wide range of other nations. Moreover, the United Kingdom has recently delivered a big trade agreement with India. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up All in all, it is perhaps no big surprise that several big firms have changed their stance on Europe. Research by KKR, for instance, has highlighted an 'investment renaissance' in the region in 2025. This is even before the possibility of potential progress on the competitiveness agenda of former ECB chief (and ex-Italian prime minister) Mario Draghi. This is a political super priority for European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen amid a blizzard of economic initiatives, including a new EU Clean Industrial Deal launched in February which may become the signature issue of her second term of office. This shift in perceptions of Europe in 2025 highlights how sentiment about powers can change, sometimes significantly, in a relatively short space of time. What has underpinned this change is political developments not only economic ones, emanating both from Europe and the United States. In Europe, markets have perceived newfound political resolve following multiple key elections in 2024 and the first half of 2025, including in the United Kingdom and Germany. There is a perception that this may provide a much needed political 'window of opportunity' for reform, including scope for a very significant defence build-up. Yet, the increased positivity of sentiment towards Europe also reflects downgrades in perceptions of the US growth outlook under the second Trump administration. Views of US financial exceptionalism have been badly dented in the last few months, not least because of the chaos of Trump's trade tariff policy. One of the many ironies about the re-election of Donald Trump as US president last year is that this key event might actually strengthen rather than weaken Europe, despite concerns to the contrary. Trump's presidency has, so far at least, been a driver for the region's economic reform and strengthening of security and defence. Yet, we should not get carried away with this positivity. While there is still more potential for Europe to surprise on the upside, the fact that the region is at a possibly big economic and political pivot point means there are less rosy scenarios that may still materialise. What makes Europe's future economic and political pathway hard to forecast is that the regional landscape is characterised by intense volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (Vuca). So it is full of both risk and opportunity, with the balance between the two waxing and waning from time to time. At present, there is an upswing in positive perceptions about Europe's prospects, despite the region's ongoing challenges. Yet, several plausible developments could, collectively, help sour sentiment again. One example is the Ukraine war, which shows little, if any, sign of being resolved anytime soon. Indeed, there is a growing possibility that the conflict could continue into 2026, despite Trump's campaign pledge to resolve it within a day of taking office. Perhaps the central challenge facing the region, however, is enhancing its competitiveness, particularly in the EU's largest economies: Germany, France, and Italy. All three still face significant economic problems whereas some southern European powers such as Spain, Greece and Portugal, plus much of Eastern Europe, have outperformed the EU growth average in recent years, a trend likely to continue in the medium term. Failure to reform, economically, will intensify the political challenges facing Europe. Right-wing populism has not lost its appeal, as was shown in last Sunday's Polish presidential election result, which saw conservative historian Karol Nawrocki elected. A fan of Trump, Nawrocki flew to Washington during the election campaign for a brief meeting and a thumbs-up photo of himself with the US president in the Oval Office. Indeed, the rise of right-wing populism may yet help make for an existential crisis for the EU. No less a figure than Draghi highlighted this possibility last September in his European competitiveness report. Moving from domestic to international politics, the geopolitical context facing Europe is also likely to continue to be very difficult in the second half of the 2020s, whether or not Trump can deliver a sustainable deal to end the Ukraine war. This would primarily be because of continuing security problems posed by Russia. Beyond Moscow, there are wider challenges, including the possibility of significant migration flows from the region's southern borders, plus ongoing tensions in the Middle East. So, while the 1920s became known as the prosperous 'Roaring 20s', a century later there is a significant risk that the 2020s will be seen as a much more difficult 'Warring 20s' that help pivot Europe's future in a negative direction. Taken together, this showcases the potential tipping point that Europe may still be at. The first half of 2025 has been, overall, more positive than many expected, but big challenges still lie ahead, which could change the picture again in a significantly more negative direction. The writer is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics
Yahoo
01-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Stanley Fischer, Who Spread Macroeconomic Gospel, Dies at 81
(Bloomberg) -- Stanley Fischer, a professor and practitioner of macroeconomics who helped guide central banks in two countries, Israel and the US, and mentored a younger generation of economic decision-makers, has died. He was 81. Billionaire Steve Cohen Wants NY to Expand Taxpayer-Backed Ferry Where the Wild Children's Museums Are Now With Colorful Blocks, Tirana's Pyramid Represents a Changing Albania The Economic Benefits of Paying Workers to Move NYC Congestion Toll Brings In $216 Million in First Four Months He died on Saturday, the Bank of Israel said in a statement, expressing condolences. Fischer, known as Stan, served as vice chairman of the US Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2017 following eight years as governor of the Bank of Israel, adding to a resume that included time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spells at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and a stint as vice chairman of New York-based Citigroup Inc. The roster of MIT students he taught and advised included Ben S. Bernanke, who would go on to become Fed chair and called Fischer his mentor; Mario Draghi, a future European Central Bank president and prime minister of Italy; Lawrence Summers, who would serve as US Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton; Greg Mankiw, who would lead President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers; Kazuo Ueda, named Bank of Japan governor in 2023; and IMF chief economists, including Olivier Blanchard, Ken Rogoff and Maurice Obstfeld. Countless other college undergraduates were introduced to the dismal science by Macroeconomics, the textbook Fischer wrote in 1978 with his MIT colleague, Rudi Dornbusch. The 13th edition of the book was published in 2018. 'It is hard to think of any other macroeconomist alive who has had as much direct and indirect influence, through his own research, his students, and his policy decisions, on macroeconomic policy around the world,' Blanchard wrote of Fischer in 2023. Fischer and Blanchard co-authored Lectures on Macroeconomics, published in 1989. Dispatched on several occasions to extinguish economic emergencies around the world, Fischer drew academic lessons from his first-hand experience with countries in crisis. The pattern began in 1983, when George Shultz, then the US secretary of state, invited Fischer to serve on a joint US-Israeli team of experts helping Israel reverse a prolonged period of weak growth, triple-digit inflation and falling foreign exchange reserves. Their work resulted, in 1985, in an economic stabilization program combining a large reduction in government subsidies with the fixing of the exchange rate, a tightening of monetary policy, and wage and price controls — followed, crucially, by the US supplying a $1.5 billion two-year aid package. That was a prelude to Fischer's tenure as the No. 2 official at the IMF, the lender of last resort to countries in economic peril. Starting in 1994, Fischer traveled the globe to help resolve interrelated financial crises in Mexico, Russia, Brazil, Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea. His role meant he often overshadowed his boss, IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus. But years later, Fischer credited Camdessus with keeping a sense of calm following the collapse of the Mexican peso in 1994, the first IMF crisis Fischer faced. Emergency Loans 'I thought Western civilization as we knew it was coming to an end,' but Camdessus 'had seen this particular play before,' Fischer recalled. The IMF provided about $250 billion in emergency loans during Fischer's seven years as first deputy managing director, ending in 2001. To accept Israel's 2005 offer to head its central bank, Fischer, an American citizen since 1976, added Israeli citizenship. He conducted business in Hebrew, with an accent that indicated his upbringing in southern Africa. Under his leadership, Israel's central bank was the first to cut rates in 2008 at the start of the global economic crisis, and the first to raise rates the following year in response to signs of financial recovery. In 2011, responding to a global downturn, the bank embarked on a series of rate cuts that pushed the benchmark from 3.25% to a record low 0.1% in 2015. Major changes enacted by Fischer during his eight-year tenure included shifting responsibility for the monthly interest-rate decision from the governor alone to a six-member Monetary Committee, including three outside academics. 'It is testament to Stan's skillful handling of Israel's economy that it is one of the very few advanced economies whose output increased every year through the crisis period,' former Bank of England Governor Mervyn King said in 2013. President Barack Obama appointed Fischer as vice chairman of the Fed Board of Governors under Janet Yellen. Fischer announced his retirement in 2017, a year before his four-year term was to end. He joined BlackRock Inc. as an adviser in 2019. Africa Upbringing Fischer was born on Oct. 15, 1943, in Mazabuka, a town in Zambia, the nation then known as Northern Rhodesia. His family was part of a close-knit community of Jews who had emigrated to southern Africa. His Latvian-born father, Philip, ran a general store. His mother, Ann, had been born in Cape Town, the daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, according to a Financial Times profile. At 13, the family moved to Zimbabwe, then called Southern Rhodesia, where Stanley became active in the Habonim, a Zionist youth group, along with Rhoda Keet, his future wife. In the early 1960s, he spent six months on a kibbutz on Israel's Mediterranean coastal plain, where he combined learning Hebrew with picking and planting bananas. He was introduced to economics through a course in his senior year in high school and moved to the UK to study at the London School of Economics, earning a bachelor's degree in 1965 and a master's in 1966. He chose MIT for his doctorate work so that he could study under future Nobel laureate economists Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow. He said he may have been drawn to macroeconomics 'because I was interested in big questions.' 'I had this image of the world as we knew it having nearly collapsed in the 1930s, and that these guys' — the macroeconomists — 'had saved it,' he said in a 2005 interview with Blanchard. He earned his Ph.D. in economics in 1969, worked as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, then returned to MIT in 1973 as an associate professor. The first course he taught was monetary economics, alongside Samuelson. He became a full professor in 1977. Bernanke, who earned his Ph.D. from MIT in 1979, traced his interest in monetary policy to a conversation he had with Fischer — 'then a rising academic star' — in the late 1970s. 'Read This' He said Fischer handed him a copy of A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960 (1963), by Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz, with the encouragement, 'Read this. It may bore you to death. But if it excites you, you might consider monetary economics.' Bernanke credited Fischer with popularizing the principle that while the Fed pursues goals set by the president and Congress, it has policy independence — freedom to use its tools as it sees fit to achieve those goals. As chief economist of World Bank from 1988 to 1990, Fischer visited China and India and became, he later said, 'gripped by the problem of development.' After Fischer left the IMF in 2001, he joined Citigroup Inc. as a vice chairman and drew on his experience to lead the bank's country risk committee. Fischer declared himself a candidate for the top role at the IMF in 2011, following the resignation of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. At 67, however, he was over the IMF's age limit of 65 for managing directors, meaning he would have needed a change in rules. The job went to Christine Lagarde. In 2013, Fischer was thought to be a possible candidate to succeed Bernanke at the helm of the Fed. Obama instead chose Yellen, with Fischer as her deputy. 'In a just world, Stan would have served at some point as Fed chairman or managing director of the IMF,' Summers wrote in 2017. 'Fate is fickle and it did not happen. But Stan through his teaching, writing, advising and leading has had as much influence on global money as anyone in the last generation. Hundreds of millions of people have lived better because of his efforts.' (Updates list of chief economists Fischer taught in fourth paragraph.) YouTube Is Swallowing TV Whole, and It's Coming for the Sitcom Millions of Americans Are Obsessed With This Japanese Barbecue Sauce Mark Zuckerberg Loves MAGA Now. Will MAGA Ever Love Him Back? Will Small Business Owners Knock Down Trump's Mighty Tariffs? Trump Considers Deporting Migrants to Rwanda After the UK Decides Not To ©2025 Bloomberg L.P. Error while retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data
Yahoo
01-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Stanley Fischer, who spread the macroeconomic gospel, dies at 81
(Bloomberg) — Stanley Fischer, a professor and practitioner of macroeconomics who helped guide central banks in two countries, Israel and the US, and mentored a younger generation of economic decision-makers, has died. He was 81. Billionaire Steve Cohen Wants NY to Expand Taxpayer-Backed Ferry Now With Colorful Blocks, Tirana's Pyramid Represents a Changing Albania Where the Wild Children's Museums Are The Economic Benefits of Paying Workers to Move NYC Congestion Toll Brings In $216 Million in First Four Months He died on Saturday, the Bank of Israel said in a statement, expressing condolences. Fischer, known as Stan, served as vice chairman of the US Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2017 following eight years as governor of the Bank of Israel, adding to a resume that included time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spells at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and a stint as vice chairman of New York-based Citigroup Inc. The roster of MIT students he taught and advised included Ben S. Bernanke, who would go on to become Fed chair and called Fischer his mentor; Mario Draghi, a future European Central Bank president and prime minister of Italy; Lawrence Summers, who would serve as US Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton; Greg Mankiw, who would lead President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers; Kazuo Ueda, named Bank of Japan governor in 2023; and two IMF chief economists, Olivier Blanchard and Maurice Obstfeld. Countless other college undergraduates were introduced to the dismal science by Macroeconomics, the textbook Fischer wrote in 1978 with his MIT colleague, Rudi Dornbusch. The 13th edition of the book was published in 2018. 'It is hard to think of any other macroeconomist alive who has had as much direct and indirect influence, through his own research, his students, and his policy decisions, on macroeconomic policy around the world,' Blanchard wrote of Fischer in 2023. Fischer and Blanchard co-authored Lectures on Macroeconomics, published in 1989. Dispatched on several occasions to extinguish economic emergencies around the world, Fischer drew academic lessons from his first-hand experience with countries in crisis. The pattern began in 1983, when George Shultz, then the US secretary of state, invited Fischer to serve on a joint US-Israeli team of experts helping Israel reverse a prolonged period of weak growth, triple-digit inflation and falling foreign exchange reserves. Their work resulted, in 1985, in an economic stabilization program combining a large reduction in government subsidies with the fixing of the exchange rate, a tightening of monetary policy, and wage and price controls — followed, crucially, by the US supplying a $1.5 billion two-year aid package. That was a prelude to Fischer's tenure as the No. 2 official at the IMF, the lender of last resort to countries in economic peril. Starting in 1994, Fischer traveled the globe to help resolve interrelated financial crises in Mexico, Russia, Brazil, Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea. His role meant he often overshadowed his boss, IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus. But years later, Fischer credited Camdessus with keeping a sense of calm following the collapse of the Mexican peso in 1994, the first IMF crisis Fischer faced. 'I thought Western civilization as we knew it was coming to an end,' but Camdessus 'had seen this particular play before,' Fischer recalled. The IMF provided about $250 billion in emergency loans during Fischer's seven years as first deputy managing director, ending in 2001. To accept Israel's 2005 offer to head its central bank, Fischer, an American citizen since 1976, added Israeli citizenship. He conducted business in Hebrew, with an accent that indicated his upbringing in southern Africa. Under his leadership, Israel's central bank was the first to cut rates in 2008 at the start of the global economic crisis, and the first to raise rates the following year in response to signs of financial recovery. In 2011, responding to a global downturn, the bank embarked on a series of rate cuts that pushed the benchmark from 3.25% to a record low 0.1% in 2015. Major changes enacted by Fischer during his eight-year tenure included shifting responsibility for the monthly interest-rate decision from the governor alone to a six-member Monetary Committee, including three outside academics. 'It is testament to Stan's skillful handling of Israel's economy that it is one of the very few advanced economies whose output increased every year through the crisis period,' former Bank of England Governor Mervyn King said in 2013. President Barack Obama appointed Fischer as vice chairman of the Fed Board of Governors under Janet Yellen. Fischer announced his retirement in 2017, a year before his four-year term was to end. He joined BlackRock Inc. as an adviser in 2019. Fischer was born on Oct. 15, 1943, in Mazabuka, a town in Zambia, the nation then known as Northern Rhodesia. His family was part of a close-knit community of Jews who had emigrated to southern Africa. His Latvian-born father, Philip, ran a general store. His mother, Ann, had been born in Cape Town, the daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, according to a Financial Times profile. At 13, the family moved to Zimbabwe, then called Southern Rhodesia, where Stanley became active in the Habonim, a Zionist youth group, along with Rhoda Keet, his future wife. In the early 1960s, he spent six months on a kibbutz on Israel's Mediterranean coastal plain, where he combined learning Hebrew with picking and planting bananas. He was introduced to economics through a course in his senior year in high school and moved to the UK to study at the London School of Economics, earning a bachelor's degree in 1965 and a master's in 1966. He chose MIT for his doctorate work so that he could study under future Nobel laureate economists Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow. He said he may have been drawn to macroeconomics 'because I was interested in big questions.' 'I had this image of the world as we knew it having nearly collapsed in the 1930s, and that these guys' — the macroeconomists — 'had saved it,' he said in a 2005 interview with Blanchard. He earned his Ph.D. in economics in 1969, worked as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, then returned to MIT in 1973 as an associate professor. The first course he taught was monetary economics, alongside Samuelson. He became a full professor in 1977. Bernanke, who earned his Ph.D. from MIT in 1979, traced his interest in monetary policy to a conversation he had with Fischer — 'then a rising academic star' — in the late 1970s. He said Fischer handed him a copy of A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960 (1963), by Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz, with the encouragement, 'Read this. It may bore you to death. But if it excites you, you might consider monetary economics.' Bernanke credited Fischer with popularizing the principle that while the Fed pursues goals set by the president and Congress, it has policy independence — freedom to use its tools as it sees fit to achieve those goals. As chief economist of World Bank from 1988 to 1990, Fischer visited China and India and became, he later said, 'gripped by the problem of development.' After Fischer left the IMF in 2001, he joined Citigroup Inc. as a vice chairman and drew on his experience to lead the bank's country risk committee. Fischer declared himself a candidate for the top role at the IMF in 2011, following the resignation of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. At 67, however, he was over the IMF's age limit of 65 for managing directors, meaning he would have needed a change in rules. The job went to Christine Lagarde. In 2013, Fischer was thought to be a possible candidate to succeed Bernanke at the helm of the Fed. Obama instead chose Yellen, with Fischer as her deputy. 'In a just world, Stan would have served at some point as Fed chairman or managing director of the IMF,' Summers wrote in 2017. 'Fate is fickle and it did not happen. But Stan through his teaching, writing, advising and leading has had as much influence on global money as anyone in the last generation. Hundreds of millions of people have lived better because of his efforts.' YouTube Is Swallowing TV Whole, and It's Coming for the Sitcom Millions of Americans Are Obsessed With This Japanese Barbecue Sauce How Coach Handbags Became a Gen Z Status Symbol Mark Zuckerberg Loves MAGA Now. Will MAGA Ever Love Him Back? Will Small Business Owners Knock Down Trump's Mighty Tariffs? ©2025 Bloomberg L.P. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
The Star
31-05-2025
- Politics
- The Star
Stop scaring future world leaders off US campuses
HERE'S yet another way in which US President Donald Trump is making America neither Great Again nor strong, but weaker, and for a long time to come: He's sabotaging the US-centred trans-national intellectual and personal networks that have amplified American power by breaking the pipeline of future leaders of foreign countries who were educated and shaped in the US. His administration is doing that by expelling, harassing, or intimi-dating foreigners at US univer-sities. It revoked the visas of more than 1,400 international students on American campuses. In some cases, the government alleged that students were pro-Palestinian protesters, in others that they committed 'crimes', even if those turned out to be unpaid parking tickets or were even non-existent. Many of the revocations had no clear rationale at all. As part of the specific showdown between the White House and Harvard University, the administration threatened to stop the institution from enrolling international students altogether; however, on Friday a federal judge temporarily halted the ban. Before that, the many lawsuits brought by international students over their visa statuses caused enough chaos that the government promised to restore due process to its review of student visas. Whether it does or not, though, the damage may already be done. No matter how many students this bureaucratic jihad ultimately forces to go home, it will dissuade myriad other young talents abroad from applying to study in America in the first place. Why should they subject themselves to legal risk or hostility (on top of America's outlandish tuition costs) when they could instead get their degrees in other countries? And among those bright young things forming new ideas, expertise, and friendships outside rather than inside of the US will be some of tomorrow's world leaders. To grasp what America in the coming years will miss out on, consider the subtle but influential webs of soft power that have long been among the boons of America's status as an educational superpower. When covering the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, or again the global one of the late 2000s, I often heard that negotiations among countries and institutions went better than expected – and better for the US, in particular – because a lot of the people in the meetings had spent time on the same campuses, studied under the same professors, or even sat in the same classrooms. They wore different garb and spoke English in different accents. But they shared the language and mentality of, say, Harvard's Kennedy School, or the economics departments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or the University of Chicago. Mario Draghi, for example, has been an Italian and a European central banker (as well as a prime minister of Italy), just as Raghu-ram Rajan ran India's central bank and the research side of the International Monetary Fund, among other things. But both got their PhDs at MIT, and were influenced by Stanley Fischer, a titan of finance (and himself a former central banker of Israel). As a professor at MIT, Fischer in fact mentored future central bankers on most continents except Antarctica. Mark Carney, a former central bank governor in Britain and Canada (and Canada's current Prime Minister), is not among them – he went to Harvard instead. In some cases, these biographies make for stories of stunning success for the individuals as well as for the world and the host country, the US. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is a Nigerian who studied at Harvard and MIT, then went on to reform Nigeria's economy in two stints as Finance minister, before working at the World Bank and running the World Trade Organisation. She's still Nigerian, but now a US citizen as well. The list of US-educated heads of state is also long. For ambitious Latin Americans and Africans, a stint or two on an American campus is practically a rite of passage. The founding father of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, sent his younger son to Stanford and the elder to Harvard's Kennedy School; that one later became Singapore's third prime minister. Taiwan's current president got his master's degree from Harvard; his predecessor got hers from Cornell. The Jordanian king also studied in America (at Georgetown), as did much of his policy elite. Saudi Arabia's crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, did not, but that makes him an outlier among Saudi royals. The Israelis love to take a swing through American campuses, including incumbent Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu (MIT and Harvard). On it goes, from Moldova to South Korea and Indonesia, where the current president did not study in the US but his influential Finance Minister, Sri Mulyani Indrawati, did (University of Illinois); she has called her American years formative. Whether an American educa-tion always makes foreign leaders more pro-American or pro-Western, or even just more capable, is moot. At a minimum, though, it lets international students see the world and their own countries through American eyes, narratives, metaphors, and references. It gives them a literal and figurative vocabulary with which they will later run international organisations or negotiate with the White House. The scholar Joseph Nye defined soft power as the ability to get others to want what you want. To the extent that a US education gets others to think as Americans think, it is the ideal tool of soft power, if you choose to see it that way. There are of course many other reasons for the US to host international students – about a million a year as of last count. Foreigners who study in America go on to invent and pioneer new technologies and business models at disproportionate rates, and most do it in and for the US. If the Trump administration pushes them away, those talents will innovate in and for China instead, or other adversaries and competitors. But the ability to form intellectual and personal networks across the world is enough reason to keep American education cosmopolitan, as opposed to barricading the ivory tower and closing American minds. In that way, education is like trade: enriching when it's open, corrosive when it closes. The benefits I'm describing pay out slowly, admittedly, and Trump isn't known for his attention span or long-term planning. But some rewards can be immediate, even if hard to quantify. Bilal Erdogan (Indiana University and Harvard) has surely talked at least some sense about America into his father, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. And as relations between the US and China become ever tenser, it surely helps both countries that Xi Jinping can turn to his daughter Mingze for discreet pointers about the Yanks. She too reportedly went to Harvard, though under an alias. Little else is publicly known, not even whether she paid all her parking tickets. – Bloomberg Opinion/Tribune News Service
Euronews
28-05-2025
- Business
- Euronews
EU Commission attempts finance boost to keep start-ups in Europe
The European Commission launched a strategy designed to foster and grow small tech start-up companies on Wednesday as part of a broader Choose Europe initiative aimed at competing with China and the US. The document sets out key actions to help companies set up and grow in the EU, including easier access to finance and infrastructure and reducing administrative burdens. Currently, some 8% of the start-ups throughout the world are based in Europe. A report by former Italian premier Mario Draghi published last year found that 61% of global funding for AI companies goes to US-based companies, 17% to Chinese and just 6% to those in the EU. To address this gap, a fund, based on a public-private partnership, will be launched by the beginning of next year to encourage start-ups to scale-up. 'Capital matters, and Europe has it. We need to connect it to the needs of the innovators,' European Commissioner Ekaterina Zaharieva said, while launching the strategy. 'A clear funding gap persists – to address key challenges and reduce market fragmentation, we will team up with private investors,' she added. The Commission also aims to simplify rules to set up a start-up in 24 hours and to enable companies operating across the 27 different EU member states to be subject to one business regime. The proposal also plans to reduce the cost of failure of start-up projects by addressing insolvency issues. "We have 30,000 early stage start-ups. We don't lack ideas, and we need a plan to maximise the potential,' Zaharieva said.
