Protest using 10 coffins to symbolise struggling manufacturing industry to take place in Brussels Job losses in EU manufacturing will rapidly increase unless Brussels stops the “colonisation” of industry by Chinese component manufacturers, a leading industry trade body has warned. Eurometal predicts 300,000 job losses in manufacturing in the rest of 2026 because of expanding competition from China, which is now enjoying a record €1bn-a-day trade surplus with the bloc. Continue reading… The Guardian
Tag: European Union
The Guardian view on rare earths: it’s common sense to secure essential supply chains | Editorial
The alarm sounded 16 years ago. In 2010, China blocked exports of key rare earths to Japan in a row over disputed islands in the East China Sea. The critical minerals are essential to everything from advanced weaponry and iPhones to electric vehicle batteries and wind turbines, so the rest of the world took note. But it didn’t take much action. China still accounts for about 70% of rare-earth mining globally and 90% of separation and processing. Then, last year, Beijing forced Donald Trump to back away from his trade…
Europe Hurries to Fund More Cutting-Edge Businesses to Compete With China and U.S.
The shiny cylindrical tanks and slant-roofed control panels shoved against a wall in C3 Biotech’s laboratory have essentially been turned into a multimillion-dollar graveyard of high-grade stainless steel equipment. All of this state-of-the art gear was discarded during the company’s quest to discover a cheap way to convert agricultural waste like potato peels or sugar beet pulp into acrylic glass, a material widely used in manufacturing. Nigel Scrutton, a co-founder of C3 Biotech in Stockport, England, makes a point of showing off these expensive failures before explaining that the eureka…
The German Auto Industry, a Pillar of the National Psyche, Is Trembling
The centerpiece of Mercedes-Benz’s 140th birthday party in January was a patent application filed in 1886 by an engineer named Carl Benz for a “vehicle with gas engine.” The way Mercedes executives spoke of the handwritten document, which at one point was projected on a large wall on the company campus in Stuttgart, Germany, it might have been a sacred parchment. It not only certifies that Germany is the birthplace of the automobile but also helps explain why the woes of the country’s automakers — Volkswagen, Mercedes and BMW —…
Trump Prepares Yet Another Strategy to Resurrect Global Tariffs
The Trump administration has cycled through trade law after trade law as it tries to find a sound legal basis to impose the steep tariffs on foreign products that President Trump wants. It is poised to try yet another approach. A global 10 percent tariff that Mr. Trump imposed in February after the Supreme Court struck down his earlier global tariffs is set to lapse at 12:01 a.m. on Friday. The administration has a new batch of tariffs ready to go to replace it, which could be announced as soon…
AliExpress fined record €550m by EU for failing to stop sale of illegal and fake goods
The Chinese online retail platform AliExpress has been fined a record €550m (£470m) by the EU over its failure to stop illegal goods including harmful clothing, cosmetics and kitchen gadgets being sold through its site. The European Commission fine is the biggest imposed by the bloc under the Digital Services Act (DSA), legislation that came into force in 2024 to protect consumers from illegal goods, deceptive or addictive marketing techniques. Henna Virkkunen, the commission’s executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy, said: “The spread of counterfeit clothing, unsafe toys,…
The American Economy Isn’t as Bad as You Might Think
I’m Natasha Saran, I’m a professor at Yale Law School and a co-founder of the Yale Budget Lab. I’m Dan Wang, I’m a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. And Dan and I are friends and also colleagues. And we’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the United States and our economy over the course of the last many years, and particularly of recent of this narrative about the idea that the United States is in some substantial decline, much like the decline of the Roman Empire…
The Chinese Company That Could Start a Trade War With Europe
On a brisk April morning in 2024, investigators raided two European offices of Nuctech, a Chinese security equipment company with a vast global footprint. The officials from the European Union seized laptops, confiscated employees’ mobile phones and sifted through documents. They were searching for evidence that the state-backed company, once led by the son of China’s former president Hu Jintao, had gained an unfair advantage while competing to install X-ray scanners and explosive detection systems at border checkpoints in more than two dozen European countries. Nuctech’s footprint is wide. Its…
EU sets up three months of talks with China over €360bn trade deficit
The EU and China have agreed to enter three months of talks to try to avoid a trade war over the bloc’s €360bn (£310bn) annual import/export imbalance. In their first joint statement in seven years, the two sides agreed in Brussels to open a formal trade consultation after weeks of threats and recriminations from China if the EU imposed any measures to stop the flood of goods and components into the bloc. The EU’s trade commissioner, Maroš Šefčovič, said he hoped the “dialogue would bring tangible results” before the next…
UK to halve tariff-free steel imports to counter glut of cheap Chinese metal
The UK government will halve the amount of tariff-free steel imports allowed in an attempt to counter a global oversupply of cheap Chinese metal and bolster its beleaguered local industry. New “safeguards” will be introduced on 1 July and will coincide with similar new limits being introduced by the EU for the same purposes. At the same time tariffs on steel imports above the duty-free quotas will be doubled to 50% of the product’s value. The quotas replace existing pre-Brexit rules that set import levels across the EU. The UK…