We regret but have to temporary suspend the shipments to USA

Longer term all trade will just be rerouted to exclude the US.

The EU is making moves right now to position itself as the preeminent center of world trade.

Losing that position will hurt Americans more than anyone else.

> The EU is making moves

The EU being what it is considering to start planning to make a plan to take moves to plan these moves.

Then it will have to align those plans with all its members etc.

What you are perceiving as slowness can also be perceived as institutional stability - the very thing the US is lacking and that is leading to all of this in the first place.

Unfortunately Europe has to pick between actually taking decisive actions and doing something or another 20 years of stagnation (i.e. institutional stability).

You can’t have both..

Yes, negotiating take time. Consensus takes time. That’s fine. It’s one thing to move fast and break things with a website, it’s another to do it with the economy. The EU is not universally loved, far from it, but it is a predictable and reliable partner.

It generally punches below its geopolitical weight, but that’s because it was happy to follow the US when American policies were decent (not great, but good for trade and mostly good for stability). But that’s not a law of nature, things do change, even if it is slow compared to the modern news cycle.

A period of economic stagnation that has lasted for almost an entire generation at this point seems like a rather high price to pay for that stagnation. Surely there must be some balance?

EU will probably tax some theoretical outside lights sustainability tax which will be way higher than what US does with metals. At best, EU would be sustainable center of sustainability trade.

I can’t wait to see what will happen when German auto industry crashes. It will be a very very interesting domino fall. Unfortunately I’ll watch it from inside, so it won’t be fun, but it will be interesting nonetheless.

And those decisive actions will probably end up being bottle cap style.

Indeed. That's why it's making moves to aggressively rearm right now - so it can move as its own entity on the geopolitical stage.

Once that's complete and the dependence on the US is broken, expect more dramatic moves.

Yes, there must be some balance and things should be streamlined. It’s counterproductive to have a country like Hungary stall completely on some subjects despite an otherwise unanimous agreement, for example (mostly on defence in this case). And defence is a weak spot. So is the pitiful diplomatic weight outside of technical trade discussions.

At the same time, there are things to keep in mind:

- this is asking member-states to delegate some of their sovereignty, which is never all easy and always involves quite a bit of horse-trading

- the member-states are perfectly happy to fuck things up on their own and things like growth figures for the eurozone actually mask very different realities depending on the country and its government

- stagnation is a very western point of view, things are still changing quite a lot on the eastern side

- the reference point should be the same situation without the EU. I am not sure, for example, that things would be improved with a trade war between Germany and France, the baltics fending off for themselves, or each country having its own import requirements and sets of tariffs.

Poland's GDP has increased by 500% since 2000.

It probably won’t crash i.e. they will retain enough market share domestically if the EU enacts sufficient protectionist policies.

Export markets will of course collapse outside of the very high-end. But that has been slowly occurring over the last few years anyway.

The single market and tariff free trade existed long before the EU was technically a thing. I do certainly agree about east vs west, though.

I do also strongly believe that the Eurozone or a rather a monetary union without a fiscal union hasn’t been the best idea as far as south-north goes.

And then you have countries which are doing quite well despite retaining their free-floating currency.

Well yes and Italy is still below its 2008 peak. It’s rather implicitly obvious that when someone is talking about stagnation they mean Western Europe.

Poland is an interesting case in that you can retain a free floating currency and your own monetary policy and still do quite well.

It was very strange when Germany was one of the countries blocking protectionist policies for car industry. If they keep going for short profit avoiding retaliatory policies, it may get awry.

I think there will be even stronger trend of european brands put on Chinese made cars. Like Renault is already doing with Dacia Spring. Brands themselves will survive, even companies themselves may survive, but many of them may be just headquarters. Moving production means supply chain follows. And that's where most of the jobs are. Over time R&D will follow factories. So for the job market it could be pretty close to full-on crash.

> The single market and tariff free trade existed long before the EU was technically a thing. I do certainly agree about east vs west, though.

They existed long before the EU was called the EU, but that is misleading.

Both the customs union and the common market were created in 1957 with the European economic community, which got a new name and a coat of paint to become the EU in 1993. Both are fundamental parts of the European project. They would not exist without the EU and the EU would not exist without them.

> was very strange when Germany was one of the countries blocking protectionist policies

Because they believed the actually had a chance of remaining competitive in the Chinese market.

Turns out that was highly delusional in hindsight.

That was a year ago when the writing was already on the wall. I guess they accepted defeat and just want to cash out in Chinese market as much as possible before the inevitable hits.