Atlantis wrote:When we get our Margrethe Vestager to go after US multinationals, it'll be a bloodbath on Wallstreet
Trump has been shitting on Europe for quite some time now. He, obviously, has some lessons to learn and, obviously, does not know it.
Someone asked Margrethe Vestager if she’ll be warier of acting against American companies now that Donald Trump is president. The audience tittered uneasily, as Europeans tend to do at such events whenever Trump is mentioned.
Nothing would change, she replied. “We’re not going hard at U.S. companies specifically. It’s not your flag that matters to us. What really matters is:
If you want to do business in Europe, you play by the European rule book.”This was another of her well-worn aphorisms, but it masked the latest international wrinkles. Trump has already shown himself to be volatile on trade policy, reflexively defensive of U.S. interests, and an intermittent advocate of the collapse of the EU. His protectionist swagger has rattled Brussels; in March, Jean-Claude Juncker, the chief of the European Commission, warned that relations with Washington “have entered into a sort of estrangement,” and that any American tariffs on European products will trigger swift reciprocal action.
“Vestager has stuck her neck out quite a lot,” a lobbyist in Brussels says. “If there is a trade war with the U.S., she will be in the eye of the storm.”
"Society in those days was a perfectly competent, perfectly complacent, ruthless machine." Virginia Woolf 1897