And I certainly agree with your title, "it takes two views to make a market".  Imagine a financial world where everyone agreed that that the price of General Motors should be exactly $30 a share.

None of the sectors is actually "productive" in terms of future earnings potential and international competitiveness.

So, not surprisingly as you might imagine, I have a contrary view on this point.  I think US business has a significant market position and competitive advantage in three industries that will grow rapidly globally over the next 20 years: information technology, healthcare (more in the sense of drugs, medical devices, and biotech than in the sense of the provider side (hospitals, doctors and nurses) and in financial services.  There are strong worldwide trends that will drive each of these business segments in the forseeable future, and US business will benefit greatly from that.  These industries dominate the S&P 500, which is a broad view of the importance of industries in the US.  These three industries represent half of the S&P value

S&P 500 Industry weightings   

How various industries were represented in the S&P 500 as of Jan. 22:

Financials 18.2%
Information technology 18.2%
Health care 14.4%
Consumer discretionary 12.9%
Industrials 10.9%
Consumer staples 8.4%
Energy 6.1%
Telecommunications 5.3%
Utilities 3.1%
Materials 2.5%

Source: Standard & Poors

(My apologies that this data is from 2002, but it was all that I could quickly find, but I'm quite confident this is still roughly the picture today.  Also I realize that there are other measures of industry importance, but I just didn't have the time to track these down this afternoon.)  Most of these companies have very significant sales outside the US, so they are truly global in nature in terms of market, but primarily American owned today--but I expect more global ownership over the next two decades.

I do think European companies will do well because they are also global in nature, as will Asian non-Japan companies.  Right now investors believe US companies will do better, as reflected by the 17 P/E ratios in America versus the 13.5 P/E ratios in Europe (I would have to dig to pull that out, but I saw it in the last few days--sure I could find it with a little more tiime).  The higher P/E reflects investor expectations that those companies wil grow faster than lower P/E companies.

However, and here I am very much the contrarian on this site, I expect the overall GDP growth rates (not addressing equity issues with these comments) to remain higher in the US than the EU.  The EU has made political, social and economic choices that have limited their GDP growth over the timeframe shown by the OECD graphs, and that has continued in 2005 and early 2006.  This is not meant to be a criticism of those choices made by the EU.  Clearly there are lifestyle benefits enjoyed by Europeans that they value when they make these choices, and I think it's illogical for people outside those societies to criticise choices made by people in free democratic societies.  But choices involve tradeoffs, and policies that have led to a broader social net and more equality among income classes, IMHO, have also led to lower GDP growth and higher unemployment.  But it's not just coincidence that these numbers have been so consistent over the last 15 years, and the policies are not changing, so I don't expect the numbers to change.

Here are some comments on the healthcare and technology industries from a post, Significant growth over next 5 years , last September.

IMO two western industries will do especially well, and I mentioned this in an earlier post.  Those industries were information technology and health care (where I used medical devices as the example, and specifically the endovascular segment of this industry).  Demographics in Western countries and increasing wealth in developing countries will lead to rapid growth in healthcare, and many life savings products and technologies.  The technology base in healthcare is incredible right now to support new innovation, with gene structure information available and many new tools available to exploit that data base.  Minimally innvasive technology forms a wonderful base for miniaturized chips and "machines" to be placed in the body for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes.

In technololgy, there is the same type of opportunity in the sense of a wonderful existing base of technologies, tremendous opportunities to improve productivity in general industries by using these new technologyies, which is a key driver of improving GDP per capita.  Asia is heavily involved both as a consumer and a producer.  Both technology and healthcare are truely world wide markets.