Not really sure of Americans being a special league of its own.
As far as I was aware, there was a huge uptick in mainland Chinese tourists in Europe during the last twenty five years. Maybe there's been a shift in recent years but statistically,I would not have imagined that US citizens in Europe would be so pronounced.
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The article is paywall'd but Americans going on holiday in Europe is nothing new.
What would be a game changer is if they were all spending bitcoin and thus spreading immense amounts of real wealth across the continent.
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I also didn't read the article, but I think people are talking about Europe becoming almost entirely a tourism economy, as the continent deindustrializes.
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This is just what I was talking about with a friend some time ago, Europe is becoming the Boutique continent of tourists, especially Americans, who come to see museums, monuments, to eat, and enjoy a decadent Western culture.
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It came up in the discussion under one of @TomK's posts, recently.
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That's it, that's what's happening unfortunately...
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Hasnt this always been the case? I know many americans go to europe to take vacations. Especially france and greece.
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I certainly remember going to Italy every summer in the 2000s without hearing english on every corner or people asking for ice in their white wine.
It's not necessarily a bad thing. New York was becoming a place for tweens larping living in NYC for two weeks as well. That's just part of this modern world now, why should it be a bad thing? Except for the ice in white wine thing, that's a tragedy.
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I think that before it was more prevalent it was other Europeans who traveled through Europe.
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We are going down this path, indeed...
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If I was chinese, I'd try to invest my money outside of the authoritarian regime that pretends to be socialist as well. Property rights in China are only as safe as the grace of Xi goes. In the west you have at least the baseline confidence of due process.
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