Cannot Sit Idle

Chapter 669

Waging a trade war did not mean letting industry expand madly without restraint. Countless cases had proven that uncompetitive enterprises were the first to collapse when a crisis struck.

Large but weak industries could hardly gain a foothold in international competition. Austria had already moved beyond the era of blindly pursuing quantity; what it needed now was to give equal weight to quality and quantity.

Before Christmas 1879, in order to cool the market down, the Austrian Government issued a Market Risk Warning, listing thirty-nine industries as suffering from excess capacity.

At the same time, it raised the threshold for investment entry. In addition to requiring registered capital, it also imposed technical requirements. Capitalists wishing to invest in these industries had to adopt the most advanced technology currently available.

In truth, these thresholds were not much of a problem for capital. Other than in high-tech fields, any technology in other industries could be easily bought as long as one had money.

Franz did not expect investors to heed the government's warnings. Faced with profit, people always liked to ignore risks.

Forcing everyone to adopt more advanced productive capacity and improve their products' competitiveness was mainly intended to ensure that these latecomers could hold out a little longer when the crisis erupted.

This was extremely important. Once a global overcapacity crisis broke out, enterprises would compete in overall strength. Costs and capital would determine who survived to the very end.

The victor was king, but so was the survivor. The enterprises that remained standing in the end were the true winners.

The same held true for nations. Whichever country had more surviving enterprises, and stronger ones, would become the new industrial hegemon.

Perhaps at the beginning of the crisis, British and Austrian capital would join forces to eliminate their