alt Hacker NewsEU economy is not on par with the US economy. This is a dangerously old belief. That was maybe true in 2000 but not in 2026. EU GDP per capita is ~$48k and US GDP per capita is ~$94k. US economy is nearly twice as big. Quarter of a century of higher growth will do that.
EU does run a trade surplus with the USA. In a big fight the USA would, strictly speaking, have to replace more stuff than the EU would. However that ignores the makeup of the things being traded. EU exports to the US is dominated by pharma products that the US could make generics of, misc machinery that can often be replaced by Chinese competitors now, and luxury goods the US doesn't strictly need. US exports to EU are critical for the functioning of the economy (assuming you count tech services as exports).
It would be catastrophic for the world if there was a serious trade war between US and EU but if it involved major disruptions to tech services the EU would fold within days. There are no home grown replacements for most US software and no ability to make them anytime soon (especially as any broad spectrum sanctions would include frontier AI models).
> EU economy is not on par with the US economy. This is a dangerously old belief. That was maybe true in 2000 but not in 2026. EU GDP per capita is ~$48k and US GDP per capita is ~$94k. US economy is nearly twice as big. Quarter of a century of higher growth will do that.
I think per capita is not a useful measure here? The populations are unequal.
By nominal exchange rates, the US economy is estimated to be $31.856T this year; the EU's $23T; by purchasing power parity exchange rates, the EU is $30.678T.
Exchange rates matter for what actually gets traded, but they're also easily shifted by interest rate policies. But even with this, any simplification of economics sufficient to fit in a comment is going to be very misleading about questions of who is more or less dependent on global free trade, the US or the EU. Even the complexity you list: I suspect there's an office or five in various EU nations filled with economists trying to work out exactly what would go down if there was an EU-US trade war and how to remove the critical points of failure.
> US exports to EU are critical for the functioning of the economy (assuming you count tech services as exports).
> It would be catastrophic for the world if there was a serious trade war between US and EU but if it involved major disruptions to tech services the EU would fold within days.
Yes, but this is kinda the point of all the digital sovereignty stuff.
It was already weird to me, as an iPhone app developer in Germany making apps for Germans living in Germany where sometimes the only language option was German, that I had to tick a box while uploading apps confirming that any encryption in the app would be in compliance with US export laws*; now, it's unacceptable.
* https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/manage-ap...
(Irony, that page links to https://bis.doc.gov/index.php/policy-guidance/encryption which for me has an SSL error)