How Europe Dodged a Factory Crisis
Forecasts that the continent’s industrial base would be crippled by the energy crisis aren’t borne out by recent data.
Employees check all-electric Taycan automobiles on the production line at the Porsche AG factory in Stuttgart, Germany.
Photographer: Krisztian Bocsi/BloombergHello and welcome to Elements, our daily energy and commodities newsletter. Today, Bloomberg Opinion’s David Fickling explains why the doom-and-gloom forecasts for European factories during the energy crisis aren’t coming to fruition. To learn more about the activist campaign against Adani Group, click here. To understand why you might see designers of haute couture wading through algae pools, read this. If you haven’t yet signed up to get Elements sent to your inbox, you can do that here.
Some of the strangest phenomena in the global economy are the things that every sensible analysis would predict are going to happen which then don’t. Economist Robert Solow once marveled at how the rise of computing failed to advance productivity. Something similar is happening with 2022’s European energy crisis.