They might be more inclined to ask this question when the pickup in Europe becomes more visible. But it will start to require more capital, and we're going to miss that. A revival in Japan seems further off for the moment, but even now there's strong capital spending. Yes, there's financial disaster in the rest of Asia, but taken together the Asian tigers and China are only a third the size of the U.S. economy. Without realizing it, we have come to depend on others' weakness for our market's success.
Foreign money is inherently jumpier than domestic.
When the flows slow or reverse, we have a problem. When I lived in Canada, the superiority of the public sector as a leading force in national development was demonstrated by the country's electric utilities. Thanks to central planning at the provincial level, and to cheap financing available because of the guarantees of a prudent government, Canadians had vast transmission networks and huge, gleaming, Canadian-made generators. In Ontario, those generators were safe Atomic Age wonders, not like the unclean weapons reactors we had in the insensitive, profit-maximizing States. Little is left of this dream world apart from a pile of yellowing brochures and an even bigger pile of compounding debt.