It's European invasion

All the European brands have existed for years. It's just accessibility. The World has become a global village. There are plenty of modest European brands with modest prices... It's a common thing that prices of US products  start where European end..

Harold-not-the-barrel
Albert Einstein foresaw gravitational waves a hundred years ago, actually he reinvented the whole physics. It has always been brave and fearless individuals who change the world, not ideologies no isms whatsoever.

What Einstein didn’t foresee was that black holes would produce gravitational waves. Einstein was not (rpt not) on board the whole black hole train. But it was the merger of two black holes that produced the gravitational waves detected by LIGO in 2015. The Golden Age of black holes, when most of black hole theory was conceived, was in the 60s - after Einstein had passed away. Wheeler, Thorne, Hawking, et al. Mostly US, you know, MIT, Princeton, Caltech, the usual suspects. Actually, Einstein missed the boat on quantum mechanics, too. He was not (rpt not) a big fan. 😛

In America, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer . We have so many millionaires who can afford those high-end brands, regardless of country of origin .
 We don't produce enough engineers or scientists for our needs here and must hire educated immigrants to fill those jobs . Education in America produces vast numbers of moderately educated citizens .
 Europe took decades to recover from WWII and now compete and produce as America once did . My point of view , FWIW.

@inna I agree with you

Question for us, as members of audiophile community, could be - what can we do to try and influence this unfortunate tendency in an effort to reverse it ?