Olli Rehn on the Big Competitiveness Challenge Facing Europe
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.4 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 22 October 2025
⏱️ 42 minutes
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Summary
The 2010s saw economic weakness across Europe's periphery. Countries like Greece, Spain, Italy, and so forth were the sites of so much stress. In the 2020s, however, it's reversed. The periphery is holding up well, but the industrial core is facing stress. Germany, in particular, the old powerhouse of the continent, has been slammed by the surge in electricity costs and competition with China. Other Northern states have felt similar pain. So what is the future for Europe? Can the EU project itself continue to evolve and integrate? On this episode, we speak with Olli Rehn, governor of the Bank of Finland and a member of the ECB's Governing Council. We discuss the near and medium-term challenges facing the EU and the prospects for finding a robust growth path in the future.
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| 0:53.5 | Joe, do you remember earlier this year, |
| 0:56.3 | there was a moment when everyone got really excited about Europe for the first time in probably |
| 1:02.1 | decades. See, you know what I always think about is, for the two of us, for a long time of our |
| 1:07.6 | careers, one of the many sub-themes that we go, it's like, when is it like Europe |
| 1:12.2 | going to turn on the fiscal tabs? When are they going to start spending money in Germany, all |
| 1:16.0 | these questions? When are they going to be less than us, so focused on austerity or balanced |
| 1:20.9 | budgets, et cetera? And then finally, and maybe Trump had something to do with it, and defense |
| 1:25.2 | spending had something to do with it or politics. It was, like minutes and everyone was really excited about some of the defense stocks and the euro's rallying and it looked, you know, a little bit more politically stable perhaps than the U.S. What's happening though? How's that going? I'm not sure. I haven't followed it as closely as I should have. I will say, I mean, the euro is still pretty strong against the dollar. And if you look at the euro stocks, |
| 1:47.8 | that's still doing pretty well as well. So there is some optimism that is still circulating the |
| 1:53.3 | market, but you're absolutely right. We should talk about what this means. What does it actually |
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