Fabrizio Capobianco, an early tech entrepreneur from Italy who lived for decades in Silicon Valley: “ What is different in America is the speed of almost everything. Americans make decisions very fast. Europeans need to talk to everybody — it takes months.”

Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, commenting in European red tape: “Capital can’t fuel growth if it’s trapped in bureaucracy. Yet the E.U. operates under 27 different legal systems. And even if you navigate that red tape and decide to invest — say, in an energy company — it can take 13 years just to permit a power line. You might back that project to meet soaring demand from data centers, but if those centers are training artificial intelligence, it triggers an entirely new layer of regulation. The result is paralysis.”

Neil Saunders, a retail analyst at GlobalData, on Walmart growing sales with fewer employees: “Lo