Comment by palmotea

> Germany desperately needs a wake-up call in the form of recession. German car industry has been non-competitive for multiple years now. Instead of letting it fail, the government kept on flushing money down the toilet and prolonging the inevitable.

Just let it fail? I'm reminded of this, which I read recently about rare earths:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/12/business/china-rare-earth...:

> Rare earth refineries and magnet factories all over the world have been buying Chinese equipment for the past 20 years. Many equipment vendors in North America and Europe closed when most of the world’s rare earth mining shifted to China in the late 1990s.

I'm sure that, at the time, people were saying that North American and European rare earth equipment manufacturers were "non-competitive for multiple years now."