Small Business To Save Poland?

Heres another Bloomberg/ Businessweek article:

With Poland’s economy in its worst stall since 2001, Zdzisław Polański, 64, is betting the farm at an age when most entrepreneurs are thinking about calling it quits. He’s planning to invest $10.3 million—about four times his annual sales—to build a new food packaging plant alongside the 1970s prefab facility he leases in a forest near Warsaw. Sixty percent of the funding comes from a European Union loan. A new production line, chemical and microbiology labs, and equipment for making and testing coatings and inks are Polański’s answer to sales that haven’t regained 2008 levels and the squeeze retailers have put on his customers for price cuts.
“If I don’t do this, there’s no chance for the company to survive,” says Polański, a lieutenant colonel in the communist-era air force, who took over his wife’s wrapping-paper business in the post-transition slump of 1990-1991.

False dilemma.    A loan or death?  I don't think so.  The world is swimming in excess packaging production capacity.  he ought to tap into that before he borrows ten million to speculate with taxpayer's credit.  Since it is easy to speculate with taxpayers, he does.  And he misses a more rational business move.

Contrary to this one unfortunate example, Poland's small biz is saving their economy.

The resilience of small and midsize manufacturers such as Polański—counterparts to the German Mittelstand companies with which many do business—is the one bright spot in Polish industry as the euro area endures its second prolonged recession since 2008. Exports are the only reason the economy grew in the fourth quarter, and they’re still expanding 7.5 percent in dollar terms in the first quarter of 2013.

Plenty of people know what to do, and must be doing it.  I see it at the Asian trade shows, crowded with young people from around the world, except from USA.  We have a terrible combination of entitlement and ignorance.  The pendulum needs to swing back to more freedom, which means less false security.

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