Category: Trucking News

Germany Won’t Enlist in Macron’s European Army

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Now that German leaders have responded to French President Emmanuel Macron’s provocative remarks concerning the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, an unusually wide public rift has emerged between France and Germany. At its root, it’s about France’s leadership ambitions, to which Germany is opposed without itself wanting to lead.“We do want a strong and sovereign Europe,” Foreign Minister Heiko Maas wrote in an op-ed article in the weekly Der Spiegel on Sunday. “But we need it as part of a strong NATO, and not as a substitute.”That doesn’t just mean Maas is keen to preserve Europe’s, and Germany’s, transatlantic alliance regardless of U.S. President Donald Trump’s relative lack of interest in it — simply because Europe cannot defend itself without U.S. help today. Maas insisted that “when Europe is one day able to defend its own security, we should still want NATO.” And, directly answering Macron’s musings about improving relations with Russia as the...

German Companies Love Stability. That’s Becoming a Problem

(Bloomberg) -- Tucked between rapeseed fields and wooded hills in the Austrian countryside sits one of the remaining outposts of a frantic push by the German car industry into a pricey alternative to steel.The goal was to make carbon fiber the core of future cars: combustion or electric. But it proved to be more of an engineering vanity project and highlights the shortcomings of a corporate culture that creates a bias for stability.While Germany’s focus on steady improvement has worked well in the past, it’s ill-suited for a period of rapid change. And the risks have become evident as Europe’s largest economy struggles with trade conflicts and the value chain shifting away from traditional engineering. Third-quarter economic data on Thursday are expected to show that Germany fell into technical recession for the first time in six years.Inside the SGL Carbon SE factory in Ort im Innkreis near the German border, two...