Is Europe bound for a Trumpian economic reset?
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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen gives a press conference at the EU headquarters in Brussels, Jan. 29.
Having posited last week that the incoming Trump administration eventually would force Europe to shape up its own economy, I still must profess surprise at how quickly this process is unfolding. Witness the new growth strategies unveiled in Brussels and London on Wednesday. U.K.
Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves on that day delivered a major speech on economic growth. The backdrop is a stagnating British economy plagued by persistent inflation, surging tax bills and plummeting business confidence. In their desperation to fix things, Ms.
Reeves and her boss, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, are making a habit of these set-piece policy “resets"—you’d think Britain’s economy was a faulty Wi-Fi router—but each time they manage to stumble a little further in the right direction. In this outing, Ms. Reeves promised to slash through the bureaucratic and permitting red tape that makes it difficult to build anything in Britain.
The marquee project will be a third runway for London’s Heathrow airport. That hypothetical stretch of tarmac has been discussed and debated for years by politicians of all stripes and has always faced intractable environmentalist opposition whenever an opportunity arrived to issue a final go-ahead. Who knows if this time will be any different for Heathrow, but for now what matters is the implicit signal Ms.
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