A couple of observations:
- this isn't the authoritative article on the origins of the wirecard scandal that the title would have you believe. It would be nice to read such an article but this isn't it.
- BaFin, the German regulator has historically been the one to trust but failed to verify. This to a large extent because they didn't have the budget or the staff to do their work properly, traits it shares with many other regulators around the world.
- Another problem is that regulators tend to have a two-way revolving door with the industry they are supposed to regulate. It is pretty rare to see a regulator that really takes such an industry to task.
- Finally, and more worrisome: Europe and the United States have both stopped being hungry. Yes, SV gives the USA a headstart for now, but keep in mind that SV is a spin-off of the MIC, and that without that MIC SV would have not existed as a phenomenon. The 'silicon' in silicon valley doesn't point to servers or hardware but to a much more basic element: the transistor, which displaced the vacuum tube. Back in the vacuum tube days electronics factories were much more wide-spread across the globe than they are today, the tech was much simpler and as a consequence the entry level was a lot lower. Once a country could make glass making vacuum tubes was a relatively small step away.
The distance between making glass and making modern chips is 50 years of investment in technology, a time horizon only very few regimes operate at, and usually those happen to be the plan-economies.
So for everybody else the doors are now firmly closed. Europe is on the backfoot, within another 50 years or so I expect the United States to be on the backfoot too.
Scandals like Wirecard are less rooted in the cycles of ascendancy of the tech world (though as a 'darling' Wirecard got away with more than they should have been able to) than they are in the simple fact that regulators are not operating independent of the industries they regulate.
Boeing 737 Max anybody?