> One guy asked "But have they taken on board the shareholder value
> culture?" or a variant upwards of a dozen times in an hour.
> Another guy even accepted all of our reasoning, but then said
> "at the end of the day, I don't think that the Europeans have
> got the right management culture" -- he wanted his values to be
> universally accepted more than he wanted to make money!
I think that's stretching it. He believes (incorrectly) that it is the "right management culture" that gave us the US bull market; he'd like to find someplce to go to avoid what he sees as the eventual messy fan. He's a "big story guy" and has been waiting for a chance to be smugly right about Europe, and your story certainly fits, but there's something wrong in his calculus: if those Europeans are so different from us, how will they ever have a huge bull market of their own?
I think if you're looking for reasoned discourse, you went to the wrong place :-)
/jordan