[stevenally]

In the USA California, Texas, Delaware etc all have different company registration and compliance processes. This has not damaged the business environment.

It should be left to each EU country to decide how to manage their company compliance processes. Those companies can then easily trade all over the EU.

You can easily set up a company in Ireland.

The EU does not to over reach with one-size-fits-all regulations. That will eventually lead to it's dissolution. It needs to concentrate on maintaining a free trade area.

[adamcharnock]

Well yes and no.

Yes you can form a company in Ireland while living in France. But you cannot get an Irish VAT number without a physical presence in Ireland.

And if – for example – France learns that you are running an Irish company from France (i.e. you have a 'permanent establishment' in France), they'll want you to file and pay French corporation tax. Which is likely sufficiently annoying that you may as well have formed a French company in the first place.

[bootsmann]

Its almost impossible for a fund from Germany to invest in a company from France and vice-versa. It is a significant problem!

[roenxi]

That sounds like a significant problem ... for either the Germans or the French to resolve. The only thing stopping foreign investors is law enforcement officers telling them to stop. The Germans can, literally, just not do anything except enforce basic property laws and foreign investment would pour money in.

I'm put in mind of US citizens who seem to be the lepers of international finance, often when I see prospectuses they have a lot of text on the the front saying "don't show this to anyone from the US" because they don't want to deal with the compliance costs of US law. In that case it is the US's problem and the US has an easy solution.

When people talk about larger regulatory frameworks they see the problem as the more permissive side is giving people options and want that shut down immediately. If the US started talking about global regulation to ease investment, for example, that means they don't intend to make it any easier but they do want everyone to adhere to US compliance ideas whether or not they do business in the US. It is a way for people with bad ideas to make the world worse. I'd assume the situation in Europe turns out similarly.

[mmooss]

> That sounds like a significant problem ... for either the Germans or the French to resolve.

If you do the math on the number of pairs of EU countries that need to find bilateral solutions ... it becomes clear why the EU government exists. It's just not efficient otherwise. (Answer: 351)

> When people talk about larger regulatory frameworks they see the problem as the more permissive side is giving people options and want that shut down immediately.

Who are you talking to? People on HN and in US business, and the most popular theme in US government, is anti-regulation. I think both sides are misguided, sort of like being against or for laws - we need the right laws; sometimes we need more, less, or changes.

> US citizens who seem to be the lepers of international finance

> If the US started talking about global regulation to ease investment, for example, that means they don't intend to make it any easier but they do want everyone to adhere to US compliance ideas whether or not they do business in the US ...

Doesn't Wall Street dominate international finance? They don't seem like lepers. Also, when international financial regulation has been discussed, I think it's the US that usually undermines it. But maybe you mean something else than what I understood?

[roenxi]

> If you do the math on the number of pairs of EU countries that need to find bilateral solutions ... it becomes clear why the EU government exists. It's just not efficient otherwise. (Answer: 351)

That logic doesn't hold. If it made sense supermarkets wouldn't work because they have to hold bilateral negotiations with hundreds of thousands of customers. In practice, they just offer a take-it-or-leave-it deal and people either accept it or they don't.

Similarly, countries offer a take-it-or-leave-it set of requirements to foreign investors. If investors aren't taking the deal, countries have the power to unilaterally renegotiate what they offer.

> Doesn't Wall Street dominate international finance? They don't seem like lepers. Also, when international financial regulation has been discussed, I think it's the US that usually undermines it. But maybe you mean something else than what I understood?

I dunno, maybe they operate out of the Caymans or something legally complicated. I'd estimate maybe 20-30% of the stock offers I see have a lot of front matter materials saying something to the effect of "if you come from the US you aren't even allowed to read this, go away". Very US-specific exclusions. Maybe the offers I get are too small time? I dunno, I just report what I see. I always chuckle at it though.

[mmooss]

> I'd estimate maybe 20-30% of the stock offers I see have a lot of front matter materials saying something to the effect of "if you come from the US you aren't even allowed to read this, go away".

That is interesting. I wonder why. It seems like they could offer a combined prospectus that addresses all major sets of requirements. I do know that the US an (much of?) the EU use different accounting standards; maybe the numbers are for one region or the other.

> That logic doesn't hold. If it made sense supermarkets wouldn't work because they have to hold bilateral negotiations with hundreds of thousands of customers. In practice, they just offer a take-it-or-leave-it deal and people either accept it or they don't.

This isn't buying a can of soup at retail.

[lazide]

Each of those places (besides Delaware, kinda) has economies larger than a large chunk of the EU.

[embedding-shape]

Yeah, we've realized that, that's why we keep iterating on the union :)

[tick_tock_tick]

Has it been effective though? The EU used to have a bigger GDP than the USA in 2008 now the USA is over 50% larger. Member nations are still dragging their feet on doing much of anything in the Draghi report and it's unclear if that will ever change.

[embedding-shape]

> Has it been effective though?

At what specifically?

At preventing another European war? Up until very recently, pretty good. No more world wars as of yet, but 80 years has past since the last, everyone with memories of how horrible it was, are almost gone, so I guess we're building up to another one. I'm hoping that at least Europe sticks together if it gets down to it.

I'm not sure why GDP is such an important indicator to you, it's just the value of goods and services, what purpose is that supposed to serve?

USA keeps getting a larger GDP you say, yet the population at large seems to be getting poorer, education and health care gets worse, and people finding it harder and harder to find somewhere to live. So what good does a high GDP actually give you in the world today?

[jandrewrogers]

> USA keeps getting a larger GDP you say, yet the population at large seems to be getting poorer

People in the US may be many things but poor is not one of them. The median household income is ~$85k and the median household lives somewhere pretty inexpensive. The amount of money Americans can afford to waste on things they don't need is unmatched.

[embedding-shape]

"Poor" isn't just "doesn't have N USD", purchasing power as just one example, matters so much more. But maybe it was a poor choice of words on my part, sorry.

[mmooss]

Many people in the US have a huge problem with affordability, and can't afford healthcare and medication, education, housing, and sometimes food.

[bootsmann]

This is a commonly cited stat but it is mostly an exchange rate phenomenon that disappears when you adjust for purchase power. If you go by comparing GDP in dollars the EU recovered almost half this gap last year simply from the dollar dropping in value.

[ethbr1]

I was about to say... give dedollarization spurred by the current administration a couple more years and then compare GDP.

Being the world reserve and trade currency artificially props up the value of that currency (beyond what it would otherwise be), which has the result of artificially boosting GDP to GDP comparisons.

[lazide]

My point is rather than almost anything can be made smooth if you have enough $$ pointed at making it so. One of the biggest issues with small economies is that they don’t have the capital spent to make it easy to do things yet; which is friction that helps keep them small.

[yencabulator]

This is so ridiculously contrary to a Northern European existence that it's just funny. US is ridiculously more bureaucratic with lots of back office papers shuffled around by humans. US tax filing is hard to even describe to someone who never lived there.

Official procedures can be made smooth by valuing them being smooth.

[lazide]

You just pay. All the problems are known and have workarounds, it just involves money.

That’s my point.

It doesn’t have to be nice or clean or smooth, if there is a known solution which someone can just throw money at, at scale.

The harder problem with these smaller countries and economies, is people haven’t figured out how to do that yet. So you end up having to track down x or y random lawyer, then hope they don’t screw you, etc.

[yencabulator]

That's a very American approach. Just enable a grift economy existing purely because the original thing was bad. The Nordic approach is to make the original thing better. The end result is less wasteful.