Nicolas Petit

Trained lawyer, wannabe economist. Most of my scholarship predates AI. Prof @EUI_EU & co-founder DCI @fordynamism. Member of Rhine Group 🔗

[Nicolas Petit @CompetitionProf]

1/ The big news of the week: the official launch of the Rhine Group by Mario Draghi, @patrickc, and @lugaricano. I’m honored to join as one of the few lawyers in this economics heavy group. Thread on why this initiative is different - and why it matters.

[Nicolas Petit @CompetitionProf]

Insanity is the best case for small government.

[Europa.com @europa]

🇮🇪 The Irish state has published an advert discouraging grandparents from hugging their grandchildren, as part of a campaign designed to promote "consent".

[Nidhi Hegde @nhegde]

The Onion is perfection.

[Phillips P. OBrien @PhillipsPOBrien]

People on the left trying to justify this because of anger are no different than Trump backers justifying the storming of the Capitol on Jan 6, 2021. You either are for mindless destruction or oppose it.
I am against.

[Nicolas Petit @CompetitionProf]

What’s painful is realizing that a large population of European legal scholars actually buy into the fable that neoliberalism dominates our economies

[Luis Garicano 🇪🇺🇺🇦 @lugaricano]

The biggest, and stupidest, myth in European politics, particularly popular in France, is that Europe suffers the consequences of "austerity" and "neoliberalism". In the biggest 5 countries in Europe, more than half of the population makes its income from the state, less than half from the private sector. This is what makes the problem of reducing the welfare state so impossible: more than half of the voters are net recipients. No surprise that Italy's budget has not been balanced in 100 years, France's in 50 years (ooh la la, l'austérité!!):
-France: 30 million from the state versus 21m private sector workers. State spending is 57% of GDP, taxes more than half the economy. The budget hasn't been balanced in the lifetime of most French (since 1974).
- Germany: 35 million adults from the state, versus 34 million from the private sector. 10% of the population is registered as severely disabled. Public spending is over half of GDP. Germany has had a continuous budget deficit since 2019.
-Italy: 23 million from the state, versus 20.5 million private-sector workers. Public spending is 51% of GDP. Italy has had a budget deficit every year since 1925, for 100 years.
- Spain more people get their income from the state since 2024: 18.21 million from the public sector versus 17.9 million people working in the private sector. Since 2025, Spain also had more government employees than self-employed workers (autónomos) for the first time in history. State spending is at 45%, budget has not been balanced since 2007.
- UK: 54% of households now receive more in state benefits than they pay in taxes. State spending is 44.5% of GDP, taxes (40%) are at their highest since 1950, the budget hasn't been balanced since 2001, and 1 in 5 new cars is paid by the government through a bizarre state disability scheme (Motability).

[Luis Garicano 🇪🇺🇺🇦 @lugaricano]

And then they were three (with Gemini not that far behind).

[Nicolas Petit @CompetitionProf]

@Isabelle_Szcz 🙏

[Niall Ferguson @nfergus]

This is absolutely the right approach by Winchester College. At school and university, access to all devices needs to be rationed if young people are to learn to read, think, calculate and write. Traditional cognitive skills are more not less important in the age of AI. https://t.co/qq3bsv2MAz

[Nicolas Petit @CompetitionProf]

@lugaricano To be clear the base conditions for tacit collusion need to exist, and a high concentration is one of them

[Nicolas Petit @CompetitionProf]

@lugaricano This reduces the cost of (tacit) collusion. The policy sidelines the competition law prohibition of unlawful information sharing amongst oil producers. Good intentions do not make good policy.

[Nicolas Petit @CompetitionProf]

Ahem, meanwhile @ecosia serves search queries from 🇫🇷 users and likely uses imported 🇫🇷 electricity to power its servers 🤔.

[POLITICOEurope @POLITICOEurope]

Berlin-based search engine Ecosia, used by government services, is dropping its French AI partner, Mistral, its CEO told POLITICO.

The company will now bet on open-source models, including those from China.
https://t.co/Ks0nbpSoEH

[Le Gorafi @le_gorafi]

Le prix Nobel de littérature 2026 décerné à ChatGPT

[Luis Garicano 🇪🇺🇺🇦 @lugaricano]

Great news from Mistral for Europe!!

[Aleph Alpha @Aleph__Alpha]

Small bird, fast wings, Kolibri is here.

78B parameters. 3.46B active. Up to 1M tokens of context. Built in Europe.

Now the weights are yours. Run it on your own hardware, under Apache 2.0.

[Luis Garicano 🇪🇺🇺🇦 @lugaricano]

A call to all entrepreneurs, founders, small business owners in Europe and anyone else who aspires to star a company at some point. This is the moment to act and let your voice be heard on EU Inc.

EU Inc is the proposed legislation to make it easier to start and grow a company across Europe. It is now in front of the European Parliament and also being negotiated by governments.

The objective should be very clear: you should be able to start and grow your company in Europe as your home market.

What this should mean is, I think, at a minimum this:
1, You should be able to start a company online and cheaply.
2. You should be able to have a simple registration that you can fill out by yourself, with secure identity checks built in. You should not be forced to hire and pay a notary for this process.
3. The basic rules should be the same across Europe and should be common. There should be one registry with common rules and you shouldn't have to go to the lawyers of each country to set up different subsidiaries.
4. There should be a simple way to give employees a share in what they are helping you build, through stock options. They should only pay the tax when they sell those shares and when they receive the money.
5. The paperwork should be much simplified. There should be one channel for doing the VAT across borders and use the time saved to do your job and not to do paperwork.
6. The rules should support the entire life of the business; raising money, growing, going public, and also liquidating a failed business should all be done under the European common rules. Opening a bank account in another country, hiring across borders should be seemless.

The European Commission made an initial proposal that was not sufficiently ambitious in my view but that was a useful start: it had online registration in 48 hours for less than €100 and measures to facilitate the taxation of employee stock options. It had some rules on common liquidation of the companies.

In my view it was not ambitious enough because it allowed national authorities to impose further requirements, such as notaries. It was already falling short on tax and employment, but the reforms that the other institutions are introducing are making it even less ambitious.

The draft that is being discussed by the governments eliminates the European company register and replaces it with a website that is just a portal to underlying national systems. This does not improve the creation of companies in any way. They're also eliminating the common procedures to liquidate failed companies, which was very useful because it facilitates the financing of these companies.

The danger in the legislation is that it will require so many national exceptions that the founders will, in fact, end up facing still all the different regimes and it will make absolutely no difference.

What I suggest here is that you write to your member of the European Parliament this week. Tell them about the obstacles your business is facing: the paperwork, the difficulty of giving shares, of raising money across borders. Explain what it costs and why it makes it difficult to create employment. Ask them what they will do to help you to make this legislation useful.
Your MEPs work for you. Here are their contact details: https://t.co/ZKGDwD795c

The MEP leading Parliament’s work is René Repasi. The other political-group negotiators are Axel Voss, Pascale Piera, Mario Mantovani, Pascal Canfin, Sergey Lagodinsky, Kira Marie Peter-Hansen, Arash Saeidi and Marcin Sypniewski.

Share this with other entrepreneurs. Help make sure that the people writing the law hear from the people that the law is meant to help.

[Luis Garicano 🇪🇺🇺🇦 @lugaricano]

Me escribe un amigo sobre el gráfico del @ft describiendo el resultado de 112 estudios sobre las leyes de control de alquileres, , apuntando al impacto de las leyes de control de alquileres sobre la movilidad social:
"Los de rojo son los chavales de mi pueblo que tienen que quedarse allí porque en Madrid no se construyen casas y en las que hay se tiene que quedar Maricarmen. No entiendo cómo esto puede ser progresista."

[Judith Dada @DadaJudith]

Lots of debates about sovereign vs. globally leading tech. How about: just don't do stupid things?
Rolling out clearly inferior tech that nobody uses, because iNdEpEnDeNcE? Stupid.
Refusing to even try homegrown, because it must be iNfErIoR to US tech? Equally stupid.
Demand greatness. Give builders a real shot to prove it. And when they do, prioritise your independence ruthlessly.

[Adam Singer @AdamSinger]

People who don't listen to music: "AI is going to replace all music"

People who don't read: "AI is going to replace literature"

People with no friends: "AI will replace all relationships"

People who don't practice law: "AI will replace all lawyers"

Do any of you do anything

[Luis Garicano 🇪🇺🇺🇦 @lugaricano]

Adivinad en qué país los emprendedores consideran más difícil tratar con el gobierno y en qué país (el mismo) dicen más que no volverían a emprender.

[Nicolas Petit @CompetitionProf]

This is just the beginning 👇 Watch this space for Rhine Group action.

[Luis Garicano 🇪🇺🇺🇦 @lugaricano]

We have just finished the inaugural meeting of the Rhine Group. We discussed the central elements of Europe's competitiveness agenda, including basic science, AI/compute and cybersecurity, defense, energy, entrepreneurship/start-ups.

I will be updating you on any progress we may have. Some of the projects we will pursue include:
- We'll help Europe catch up on compute (Mario Draghi diagnosed the problem and some solutions in a recent FT piece)
- We’ll help European universities and scientific institutions and explore a Rhine Chair program with European universities.
- We’ll work on some key EU policy challenges, including facilitating the flow of capital to entrepreneurs.
- We will set up a grants program that I will explain and announce here.