As the World Cup in North America draws to a close, let’s talk about the United States. The competition was an undoubted success: huge stadiums, enormous crowds, lots of tourists, buckets of revenue and great football. Despite this success, the World Cup underscored yet again how much of an outlier the US remains. Once their own side was beaten, the American public largely moved on. Sure, as it is hosted by their cities, there’s a residual interest, but nothing like the devotion elsewhere. Soccer is beloved by the rest of the globe and, although popular among America’s hipsters, it is a sporting sideshow in middle America. Locals are more invested in their “own” sports: baseball, American football and basketball. American exceptionalism is alive and well in sport.

Another place where American exceptionalism is alive and well is in finance. The Yanks obsess about Wall Street the way Europeans fixate on football. For most Europeans, the stock market is about as relevant as baseball. For Americans, it seems to be an essential part of their daily concerns. Reams of ticker-tape news fill all sorts of business programmes, 24-hour finance updates are the norm. CEOs of companies are interviewed like Premier League managers and an entire media industry relies on the daily gyrations of the stock market. Why? The reason is simple: about 50 per cent of working Americans actively invest in the stock markets through their “401k” self-managed pensions. That is more than 80 million people.

In the past few years, investment by the average American in Wall Street has increased significantly. This week, a senior Barclays executive revealed for the first time that more of American household wealth is now held in stocks rather than the traditional asset, real estate. Americans’ equity portfolios are now worth more than their homes. That means 34 per cent of American........

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