People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And what became of VW's shame and guilt? \u00a0Not very much it seems. \u00a0The Americans, who discovered the problem, did at least wallop them round the shareholder wallet, but the British, Germans and EU seem to worry about damaging the economy if too much punishment is dolled out. \u00a0And VW are not alone, the EU recently fined\u00a0German and other European companies \u2014 responsible for making for 90% of all trucks across on the continent \u2014 \u20ac3 billion for price collusion and other misdemeanours over a 14-year period. \u00a0 \u00a0And now we know that\u00a0EU competition authorities are investigating VW, BMW and Daimler over collusion by secret technology working groups dating from the 1990s. \u00a0Der Speigel<\/em> alleges that the three groups colluded over the use of insufficient amounts of an additive that neutralises diesel emissions. \u00a0All this begins to look like a shared institutional\u00a0willingness to cheat in their (and the German) interest. \u00a0The sector accounts for 20% of German industrial income, employs 800,000 people and is a visible German presence on most foreign streets.<\/p>\nIt is a short step from saying:\u00a0German car-makers cheat<\/em>, to saying\u00a0German business cheats<\/em>, and then that\u00a0Germany cheats, <\/em>and\u00a0<\/em>I know there is considerable concern in Germany about this possibility. \u00a0It's something I'll return to. \u00a0Tomorrow, however, it's time for a curious story of Swedish cultural excess in Erfurt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When I wrote this ... Just so that VW could lie to the public ... on the wall sticker in the\u00a0Gedenk und Bildungsst\u00e4tte\u00a0Centre in Erfurt, my wife said \"That makes you sound like a communist\". \u00a0Maybe so, but I have...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7033"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7033\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}