What is the difference between the U.S. way of doing business and the European way? The anecdotal answer is all too often that U.S. companies have more innovation, chutzpah and adaptability.
Think of the U.S. corporate image: It is very often based around a "can-do" attitude whereas in Europe, at best, there's an all-too-often tag of solid but dull dependability.
But let's leave the stereotypes for now and consider one of the real and tangible differences between companies in Europe and their U.S. counterparts – capital.
More specifically, the ability of European companies to access capital has been hamstrung for years by the fact that U.S. firms, both large and small, have much more varied access to capital than beleaguered peers in Europe.
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Whereas U.S. companies have been able to negotiate their way through first recession -- and then anemic growth -- with access to sophisticated and deep capital markets, the same cannot be said of companies on this side of the pond who have had to rely on banks for their credit.
The problem is that the European banking sector has been in contraction and under huge regulatory pressure and has drip-fed liquidity to the private sector engines of European growth.
Yes, big blue-chips in London, especially, and the continent have had equality in the funding markets but for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) the banks have been the only line of credit.
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In truth, though, perhaps the major difference between the two geographic regions is down to money and the Americans' ability to access it so much more easily than companies on this side of the pond.
But is that all about to change with the playing field becoming much more level?
That's the hope at least as the Capital Markets Union (CMU) "Action Plan" was unveiled a couple of weeks ago with the specific aim of shaking up the way companies in Europe can access capital and, hopefully, boost much needed economic growth and essentially jobs in the EU, which still has low growth of just over 1 percent and a jobless rate of around 11 percent.
We've had grandiose action plans before of course, who can forget the Lisbon agenda (an action and development plan devised in 2000)? But this time, Jonathan Hill, the British-born European Union (EU) Financial Services Commissioner, is trying to break down the weighty and complicated CMU project into a simple mandate – to get more funding to flow from savers to businesses.