- Attendees at the World Economic Forum have given Europe’s economy a serious bashing this week.
- They’ve blasted the red tape and bemoaned the cultural aversion to taking risks and praising loudly.
- Here’s what Donald Trump, Larry Fink, Steve Schwarzman, Christine Lagarde, and others said.
The US economy is the toast of Davos, while Europe has been thrown to the wolves at the elite gathering in the Swiss Alps this week.
World leaders, business titans, and policy gurus have hailed America’s resilient growth, can-do culture, free-flowing capital, and bright prospects if President Trump succeeds in bolstering investment and cutting regulations.
In contrast, they called out widespread pessimism, siloed markets, suffocating regulations, and an aversion to taking risks and shouting out successes in Europe.
Here are some of the best comments from Davos about Europe:
1. Donald Trump, US President
“They’re very frustrated because of the time everything seems to take to get approved,” Trump said about his European friends and acquaintances.
“I love Europe, I love the countries of Europe, but the process is a very cumbersome one, and they do treat the United States of America very, very unfairly with the VAT taxes and all of the other taxes they impose.”
2. Larry Fink, BlackRock CEO
“There’s too much pessimism in Europe,” Fink said, based on his conversations with Davos attendees. “I’ve never felt the pessimism being larger and more profound.”
“Europe is a myth,” he said, calling out its fragmented capital and banking markets, and its lack of dynamism and entrepreneurship relative to countries like the US and China.
“I don’t see Europe moving forward enough; I see Europe still focusing on backward looking too much.”
3. Christine Lagarde, European Central Bank president
Lagarde said corporate bosses are “not very upbeat” about Europe as they’re worried about issues including energy prices and excessive red tape.
Their concerns should be a “wake-up call that we Europeans, those in policymaking places, have to really take to heart and respond fast to,” she said.
“So if the European leaders can actually get their act together, respond to this wake up call and existential threat that can be identified, then I think that there is a huge potential for Europe to respond to the call.”
4. Kristalina Georgieva, International Monetary Fund managing director
Georgieva described the IMF’s economic forecast for Europe over the next couple of years as “sort of meh, not great.”
“United States has a culture of confidence; Europe has a culture of modesty,” Georgieva said. She joked the highest praise she ever received from her parents was “not too bad” while in the US, “you just move your legs and you’re fantastic, you blink and you’re great.”
“So my advice to my fellow Europeans is more confidence, believe in yourself, and most importantly tell others that you do.”
Thibaut Bouvier/World Economic Forum
5. Christian Ulbrich, JLL CEO
Ulbrich, whose company works in real estate and investment management, told Business Insider at Davos that European officials seemed prouder to announce regulations on artificial intelligence than to reveal big investments in the tech.
He said that “demonstrates very nicely the difference in culture: The Americans are looking first to the opportunity, and the Europeans tend to look first toward the risk.”
6. Steve Schwarzman, Blackstone CEO
“A lot of the European businesspeople have expressed enormous frustration with the regulatory regime in the EU,” Schwarzman said, adding that they especially blame bureaucracy for slower growth rates in Europe.
7. Ilham Kadri, CEO of Syensqo and president of the European Chemical Industry Council
Kadri said that since she moved to Europe in 2019, there’ve been “19,000 pages of regulation published just for the chemical industry,” and she’s been “hiring more people in the legal and compliance departments than in my innovation department.”
The executive said that small and midsize businesses can’t deal with the “soup of alphabet of reporting” requirements, and the bureaucratic burden is “destroying the fabric of the industry.”
Kadri called for a major simplification of the rules and removal of red tape to improve transparency and predictability, which she said would improve efficiency and drive investment.
