Is this an argument for protection of European industries from US capital?

The metrics used account for European industries which are acquired by US firms as American. If it’s a zero sum competition, letting US companies aquire EU industries is the EU ‘losing’.

It is true what they said about the Americans or Chinese buying companies.

Any big company here ends up being an “add on” to one of the big tech giants.

For example, Wolt, a very big Finish food delivery app, was recently acquired by Doordash.

As soon as something becomes huge in Europe, the big companies buy them.

After the 2008 financial crisis (when the article claims the divergence started). The US and the EU chose different paths. The US chose bailouts and the EU went with austerity. Both were very unpopular, but one of them was also stupid. Helping the “wrong” people, it turns out was a better choice than trying to actively hurt all the people.

I’m sure there is a lot of other factors at play but EU governments getting religion about belt tightening and small-government in ‘09-‘12 was phenomenally stupid.

More descriptive title: “Europe has fallen behind America re: technology, energy, capital markets, and universities, and the gap is growing”

I’m getting this error?

ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH

What a journalistical mistake, you can’t directly compare a group of countries with a single country. In this case fallen behind means in money. Which is quite a bad assumption.