Don't worry, government subsidies for an over-heated financial market for EVs will definitely work better in the U.S. than it did in China...
Financial Post (9/20/21) reports: "Visitors to Byton Ltd.’s website are greeted with colour-saturated images of shiny electric cars gliding along manicured streets. Those paying a visit to the automaker’s factory in Nanjing, eastern China may be less impressed. The plant is modern and huge, gleaming under the hot summer sun. But there’s total silence. Production has been suspended since the pandemic began and there’s no one around except for a lone security guard. Bordrin and Byton represent the flip side of China’s EV success. While home-grown stars like Nio Inc. and Xpeng Inc. have gone on to raise billions of dollars and are now selling cars in numbers that rival Tesla Inc., scores more have fallen by the wayside, unable to raise the crazy amounts of capital needed to make automobiles at scale. In many cases, they were lured into existence by provincial governments dangling cash and other incentives to make Beijing’s dream of turning China into an EV powerhouse a reality. Local authorities helped manufacturers set up factories that promised jobs and development — if they succeeded. But the tide began to turn in November, when regulators asked regional governments to review and report back on the scale of their support for the auto industry. Alarmed by unbridled investment in the sector — and the bankruptcies and zombified factories that came with it — Beijing is applying the brakes."
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"Europe is showing the folly of trying to purge CO2 from the economy. No matter how heavily subsidized, renewables can’t replace fossil fuels in a modern economy. Households and businesses get stuck with higher energy bills even as CO2 emissions increase. Europe’s problems are a warning to the U.S., if only Democrats would heed it."
– Wall Street Journal Editorial Board
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