Reuters reporting that German Finance Minister Christian Lindner, speaking on EU finances in Helsinki, has said that the European Union must not respond to the US Inflation Reduction Act with excessive subsidies.

• Lindner: "At a fundamental level, I think that the Inflation Reduction Act sends the right signal to industry that the future is climate neutral but an excessive expansion of European Union subsidies is not the right response. Instead we need to make state aid law more agile."
• Lindner told CNBC yesterday that the focus for the EU should be on “the supply side of our economies, modernizing our labor markets for example. We need a better quality of public sector investments, not more quantity of public sector investments."
• A special meeting of the European Council last week agreed to allow “for targeted, temporary and proportionate support to be deployed speedily, including via tax credits, in those sectors that are strategic for the green transition and are adversely impacted by foreign subsidies or high energy prices.”
• In his speech, Lindner also warned against a decoupling from China, arguing that an EU withdrawal would "leave the Chinese market to others."