This trend has been helped of late by the weakness of the euro. As the Times of London reported last week, a report from Cambridge Econometrics found that the currency's drop in value has arrested the trend that saw 800,000 jobs lost in the manufacturing sector in the countries of the euro zone from 1995 to 1998. That amounted to 1 percent of the manufacturing total. The United Kingdom's trends in manufacturing jobs, meanwhile, have moved in the opposite direction as it has so far resisted any temptation to link its economic fortunes with the countries of the euro zone. There's simply nowhere else to go.
Some retrenchment is likely.
One explanation for why Americans continue to think of the decline in the euro's value as a symbol of European weakness may reside in the fact that U.S. stock analysts haven't caught up to changing European realities. According to his argument, investors look at Europe and just don't like what they see. But Stewart's analysis could easily have been written a decade or two ago. It looks suspiciously like the fudging of someone who isn't following current trends. Major breakthroughs like tax reform in Germany are all but ignored in the United States, but they are part of a picture of dynamic, if incremental, change.