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Comment by sva_ | Hacker News Reader

> the entire state machinery – politicians, regulators, intelligence agencies, banks – was complicit in the fraud because they wanted to take credit for a German company making its name among the silicon valley elites.

I like how we all seem to accept this as a fact, like Germany couldn't actually have a great financial company, and seem to completely ignore the possibility of good old real corruption. But yeah, corruption luckily doesn't exist in this country.

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> I like how we all seem to accept this as a fact, like Germany couldn't actually have a great financial company

what, Deutsche Bank doesn't count?

When you're looking for a national champion fintech company, a 150-year-old stodgy bank doesn't quite fit the bill

In the Netherlands stodgy banks are responsible for 80% plastic card use, SEPA instant money transfers and internet banking.

I think you should probably poll some current and former DB employees on this one.

I guess obvious sarcasm isn't so obvious

The commercial side of DB is rock solid. They are considered a powerhouse corporate lender, deeply embedded within the German economy. On the whole (compared to other highly advanced economies), Germany companies prefer to borrow money from corporate banks directly, instead of issue bonds. (The aversion to capital markets in Germany is bizarre to me.) And corporate borrowers prefer a national champion, rather than a foreign competitor. (Massive lending [infra, etc.] that requires syndicates of commercial banks are another story.)

On the other hand, the investment bank side of DB... Sigh, that is another story. Wildly incompetent management. (See also: Credit Suisse) I cannot believe that the regulator or Bundestag (Parliment) did not force them to spin out the IB. If the corporate bank sinks with the IB, it would cause serious economic damage in Germany.

European culture largely precludes big leaps in innovation, especially corporate innovation.

I say this as a Canadian. Our culture has the same problem for different reasons.

Google could never have arisen in Canada. Not Tesla.

> European culture largely precludes big leaps in innovation

This is such a bizarrely popular statement on here. It's a huge claim and usually presented without evidence or nuance. Just start deconstructing it by asking simple things like, "what are the biggest innovations to come out of Europe that Google relies on?" and start from there.

You missed this part: > , especially corporate innovation.

And it's true. Europe is great at inventing the stuff that the US then uses to make billions.

That’s not what I responded to which is why I left it out. The main claim is explicitly stating Europe cannot innovate due to culture. Which is just ridiculous and I wish that such claims weren’t so prevalent. By all means lets have discussions about relative levels of financing, entrepreneurship, research and development. But let’s not be lazy in our comparisons and also present even just the tiniest little bit of evidence when making a dramatic claim. Let’s be curious in the spirit of this forum but not let hyperbole pollute the discussions.

It's a Tax problem and a Socialism problem more than culture problem. Socialism means taxes, and high taxes stifle innovation.

Do you think total tax burden is materially higher in Canada than the United States? For high earners, I doubt it.

And this:

    high taxes stifle innovation

I laugh when I read comments like that. If that is true, why are the most innovative countries also the richest and have high tax burdens? The top half of OECD (GDP per capita) all have high tax burden. It's hard to have a highly developed economy with a gov't that provides a good social safety net on less than 30% of GDP collected as taxes. Ref: https://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/en/data-insights/tax-to-gdp...

I would chalk it up to size of internal market -- only ~30 million -- more than anything else. Canada has produced loads (loads!) of brilliant computer scientists over the years. Sadly, they all seem to move to the US and get rich.

I'm talking about corporate tax and VAT, I'm not talking about personal income tax. EU has quite higher corporate tax and VAT than US' corporate tax and sales tax.

My argument is not against high taxes through personal income tax and property tax. It's against corporate tax and VAT/sales tax.

Ireland has one of the lowest corporate tax rates in among highly developed nations. And, in Holland, it is so easy to avoid corporate tax with transfer pricing via the Carribean. But yes, corporate taxes are high in France, and hard to avoid.

...He/she posted on the World Wide Web, invented by a Brit in Switzerland.

There's a fair chance you even used an ARM-powered device to do it. Also British.

Tesla, of course, based their first car on a Lotus. British.

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