Only 6 of the 50 largest companies are in Europe. LVMH is highest at #18

It makes it quite tricky to offer services across the whole of Europe without a lot of investment.

Well, that's fairly straightforward. All European co-operation and regulatory is implemented through the EU. It didn't used to be like that, there used to be quite a lot of separate organizations that coordinated countries and helped them work together, but over time they were all absorbed into the EU power structures.

That's a problem because the EU agenda is extremely dominated by France and Germany to the extent that the priorities of the other members don't matter much. The German economy is of course famously driven by export of goods, so not surprisingly, the EU has spent great effort on ensuring that goods can flow freely throughout the EU. There was also a big economy that was services driven - the UK. Equally unsurprisingly the EU never cared about creating the single market in services, despite sometimes promising to do so, largely because it would mean requiring France and Germany to open their markets to British companies, something they saw no reason to do.

In later years another problem emerged, which is that the EU developed a taste for power and began using whatever limited control it had over services markets to try and control neighbouring states. In particular trade in financial services is (somewhat) controlled by the EU which has a concept it calls "regulatory equivalence". We must call this a concept and not a real thing because designation of a nation as having "equivalent" regulations has nothing to do with the actual regulations or how similar they are to the EU's own, it is an entirely political and ideological matter that's used as a negotiating lever by the Commission, which can and does declare countries "equivalent" or "not equivalent" at any time, without any changes to actual financial regulations being required.

For example, despite the UK having 100% aligned financial regulations because it only just left the EU, the Commission has declared its financial services regulations to be not "equivalent" to the EU's. That is obviously a lie, but when you understand that the bureaucracy doesn't really care what words mean and treat it as an arbitrary label or tool, then it makes more sense: the EU wants to hurt the British economy so bans its services from its own markets by claiming the identical regulations somehow aren't the same.

This problem is not specific to the UK or Brexit. Financial equivalence was being used as a bartering tool in trade negotiations for years before that. The EU also likes to ban the Swiss financial firms from EU markets from time to time as part of trying to force Switzerland to accept EU rules in unrelated areas like how trade unions are handled.

Thus the lack of any unified services market in Europe can be understood as having three inter-related origins:

1. All international cooperation in Europe is controlled by the EU which means ultimately by the agenda of just one person (Currently von der Leyen).

2. That persons is appointed via presumably complex back-room deals of which little is publicly known, but which appear to usually be the result of some kind of horse trading between France and Germany. For example von der Leyen is a notoriously incompetent aristocrat famous mostly for screwing up the German military - nobody knows on what basis she got the job of Commission president, beyond some vague comments from people close to the process that the next Commission President had to be a woman, but we can assume she was placed there due to her political acceptability to Merkel and Macron and her willingness to prioritize their interests. The same can be seen for how Christine LaGarde (a French woman) ended up running the European Central Bank. Certainly, the views of other nations had little to do with it, given their track records.

3. The EU then not only fails to prioritize services integration but actively abuses service markets as part of waging trade wars, in particular, to try and force non-member states to effectively become pseudo-members in which they obey the EU in unrelated areas without actual full membership.

Unfortunately the list doesn't allow you to sort by Industry. But you can easily see larger number of Top 100 are Tech companies. Nearly Half of the Top 20 are Tech companies if you include Tesla.

Then there is the Tech / US stock market value differential.

So EUR aren't really doing that bad. Not to mention half of your 5G equipment are from EUR. Ericsson and Nokia which has a low market cap but fairly high importance.

I am not an Open Source advocate by any definition. As much matter of fact I think I prefer to use something like Shared Source as in Unreal Engine. But anyway since tech will be the infrastructure of any modern society, I would not be surprised if one day, OS, and basic form of Software are all Open Source.

94B and 58B respectively, both comparatively new companies. It’s just less easy to scale up here than it is in the US with a huge economy and one language.

Prosus is also there on the first page

The list is skewed by propped up high growth stocks with much more built in risk than we might imagine to their long term growth.

I don't see how Facebook necessarily has fat margins and growth for the next 20 years - they could conceivably go into decline.

All the measures are crude but Revenues might be the best, because frankly 'profits/earnings' are more of an investor thing, that doesn't take into consideration all the other members of the value chain.

Maybe 'Gross Margins' might be even better though difficult to determine, because Wallmart and Amazon (retail) operate on thinner margins, 'most of their sales' go down the value chain.

By 'Revenue' Germany is actually batting above it's weight, Europe could probably do to have some kind of continental winners in certain areas but that's a really hard thing to do. Even with EU integration ... nobody wants to give up their national champions.

The biggest negotiation ever that could happen in Europe would be for Germany/France/UK to maybe to agree on different sectors and allow/promote acquisitions along those lines. That will never happen of course. That could happen but more by large funds driving it to happen.

A couple o years ago, local industry lobby groups got the government to legalize the 12h workday and one top company I interviewed for had a time punching device next to the coffee machine so that employees could punch out during a coffee break as the company considered coffee breaks as non-working time for the employees and did not count to your 8h/day working time, just like your lunch break.

Thanks for the quote; the Thiel book sounds interesting.

I've been thinking about how familiar the discussion here and in the recent Economist post sounds. Isaac Asimov wrote a short story, "The Evitable Conflict" (1950), in which a future world government is divided into four regions (<https://imgur.com/N2g6DKE>). Without spoiling the story, the European bloc is described as being the smallest by population, slowest to grow, becoming a backwater compared to other regions, and content to remain that way.

Home prices and valuations are skyrocketing is a different kind of inflation, just not the one we're used to. Regular inflation is hitting hard due to COVID etc. so we're going to see the populist result of that soon.

Google demolished the newspapers classified ads. While probably more effective than otherwise ... it didn't all come out of nowhere.

Best I can tell, mix of apathy, resentment towards people who work hard, and generally smaller ambition and perspective. We have the same problem in the UK so it's not just the EU.

Economically, the EU is very powerful and influential. It exerts influence through trade agreements, standards and sanctions. Individual member states have capable nuclear arsenals and are actively engaged in missions around the world.

Since financial markets are open for anyone to invest in anything (pretty much), I also don't get why it matters where market cap is created.

For instance: Tesla has more market cap than a lot of European ICE competitors. But what VW contributes to European GDP still is much bigger than Tesla's contribution.

Those are in my personal opinion much better things to strive for than having the largest corporations and military, which I find to be more harmful than useful.

There are other things to admire about the US though, like their creativity and scientific excellence.

Yes it's far more integrated than any other group of countries, but they're still separate countries. The budget of the European Union is literally <1% of the EU GDP, for example. Although very influential, we shouldn't overstate its power. Even slight increases of this budget is immediately met with populist rhetoric in each member state, about how all money is flowing towards Brussels which is ostensibly deciding everything.

And on a cultural level, there's no real integration whatsoever, not any more than the regular globalist integration that's not European in nature (e.g. speaking English and watching Hollywood movies). As a Dutch person I literally cannot even understand the native language of 97% of the EU population.

It's a bit like asking why the United Nations hasn't worked out yet and why there's no single planetary utopian government yet.

That having been said, I would say that the EU is an economic and military superpower, but it's not as direct or centralised like a single nation. But count the number of times the EU has been attacked, or count the amount of nuclear-able countries, or the EU countries part of the planetary superpower that is NATO. Of course it's not geared as being a EU military, nor geared towards fighting far-off wars, but it's super powerful for sure. As for Economy, on a PPS basis China, US and EU are all 16% of the world economy, on a nominal basis it's 15, 24, 18. Again, not centrally-steered but definitely a superpower.

But for the same reasons you'd say "yes but it's decentralised, not one nation, so it's not a superpower despite all the economic/military might", I say that you can't even expect it to be. After all they're just 27 separate countries with their own governments, 13 of which are smaller than New York City, and California alone being bigger than all but 4 of them.