In Dresden, in eastern Germany, last year, one last car closed the assembly line at Volkswagen's “Transparent Factory,” built to highlight the pinnacle of European industrial power. Thousands of miles away in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in the US, another German giant, BMW, operates its largest plant in the world.

The contrast between the two plants helps explain a puzzle that economists have been debating for some time: Why does the U.S. economy continue to outperform many of its peers, despite facing the same global shocks?

In recent years, much of the developed world has succumbed to a succession of economic shocks. Trump's tariffs have affected global trade. Mass deportations are changing labor markets. And the conflict in the Middle East has sent oil prices soaring.

Many economists expected the US to feel the weight of those pressures strongly. Instead, the economy has continued to grow at a stable pace. Inflation has proven stubborn at times, but the combination of weak growth and persistent price increases that many feared has not occurred.

Energy markets

Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at the RSM consultancy in the United Kingdom, maintains that the trade war was the strongest test of American resilience.

“The Trump administration's own targets on trade and immigration are probably the most prominent example of the underlying dynamism of the American economy,” he said.

Facing tariffs on foreign components, U.S. corporations were not content with thin margins but invested more heavily.

“Capital investment at this time is 13.9% of US GDP,” says Brusuelas. “It should be declining, given the mix of supply and demand shocks that the economy is absorbing, but it is not.”

Instead, much of the pressure has been offset by an increase in productivity. The US economy has continued to expand at an annual rate of approximately 2%.

Energy markets offer another explanation. The war in the Middle East has raised oil prices, a situation that historically would have posed a significant threat to American growth. But the shale oil revolution fundamentally changed the US's vulnerability to energy shocks. Over the past two decades, the US has become one of the world's largest oil and gas producers, while companies have reduced their dependence on crude oil.

“The development of fracking in the United States since the early 2000s, along with the evolution of alternative fuels, has created the conditions for the contribution of oil to GDP to have fallen by half in the last 50 years,” said Brusuelas.

Risk vs. Prudence

The contrast with Europe is clear. While the US has focused on flexibility, taking advantage of fracking and allowing prices to respond to the market, Europe has relied on long-term contracts and interconnected supply networks to ensure energy security. That strategy left many countries exposed when Russian gas supplies were cut off after the invasion of Ukraine. And, given the current tensions in the Middle East, that vulnerability continues.

For Rebecca Christie, a researcher at the Bruegel think tank in Brussels, Belgium, the discrepancy is not only in policy decisions but also in cultural attitudes towards risk.

"Americans are very solution-oriented and much more comfortable taking short-term risks for long-term gains. Europe, as a culture, is more risk-averse."

He says he was at an event where the EU commissioner for financial services himself stated that people in Europe don't talk enough about the risk of not taking risks.

Even the difference in how companies and retirement systems are structured reflect that gap. In much of Europe, companies rely heavily on bank loans for financing, and workers' pensions are often tied to guaranteed protection contracts that cap both profits and losses.

“If you finance your company with a bank loan, you don't have the same flexibility as if you do it by selling your shares or attracting venture capital,” explains Christie.

In the US, companies can rely on investors and the stock market to finance themselves. That flexibility, even with its ups and downs, gives American companies an advantage over government-backed European models.

But Christie cautiously points out that macro-level resilience may hide a real problem beneath the surface.

“The US is a land with very high inequality,” he says. “If you are struggling, you are really going to have a very difficult time because the labor market is not adding many jobs, things are getting more expensive and many cities have a housing crisis.”

His deepest concern is that inequality will reach a tipping point. “Having a fairly stable dollar and banks will not help you if there is a real jobs crisis in the real economy.”

The US is not immune to pressures

So far there isn't much evidence of that. In fact, American employers added 172,000 jobs in May, shattering forecasts.

But new inflation data, showing the biggest rise in prices in three years, suggests the limit of American resilience may be approaching. Inflation stood at 4.2%.

Just because the U.S. economy is outperforming many of its rivals doesn't mean it is immune. High fuel prices, stubborn inflation and growing inequality pose risks that could erode the country's current advantage.

Still, compared with many other advanced economies, the United States remains robust. Its combination of flexible markets, quick investments, abundant energy and risk tolerance have helped it weather shocks that have stressed its peers.

“It is the cleanest shirt in a very dirty laundry,” concludes Brusuelas.