If you haven't already read it, I highly recommend the Economist's special report on entrepreneurship. Here's an explanation of why, despite everything that has happened over the past year, the US economy is still fundamentally sound in one aspect: its propensity for entrepreneurship.
Part of the reason why is that the rest of the world has barriers to entrepreneurs that the US lacks. I wrote about a few in a recent article, and the Economist adds some European-specific ones:
These cultural problems are reinforced by structural ones. The European market remains much more fragmented than the American one: entrepreneurs have to grapple with a patchwork of legal codes and an expensive and time-consuming patent system. In many countries the tax system and the labour laws discourage companies from growing above a certain size. A depressing number of European universities remain suspicious of industry, subsisting on declining state subsidies but still unwilling to embrace the private sector.
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