American business ideals

What I like about the American psyche is their ability to engage in business enterprise with their entrepreneurial spirit. The United States now has a service based economy; you exclaim, that's not exactly true, unfortunately the majority of their manufacturing base has been eroded and transferred overseas.

Design is still undertaken onshore, technology and innovation still rank highly but intellectual property and not manufacturing capability dominates the economy now. Currently, the US market is structured around consumption with retailing, after sales service, logistics and distribution the primary economic strength. Manufacturing in the US is pretty much redundant these days, although not entirely the case, technology and manufacturing capability technology continues to be exported overseas.

Americans are traditionally very strong at marketing and sales, this once again harps back to retail and services, the United States is very much a consumer driven economy. Financial services has been the growth industry, this has however been their undoing in many respects, this was the downfall of American manufacturing manufacturing. The purpose of finance is to raise capital to fund business activities and enterprise, by sending manufacturing and the respective technology offshore, economic capability is inadvertently lost.

The flow of international funds into a relatively stable US economy tends to mask the underlying issues and their causes - they just don't produce anything of substance anymore. As Wall Street is increasingly under pressure as the financial hub of the world; European, Asian and Middle Eastern financial centres are threatening the dominance of American finance and the viability of the United States as a superpower.