Quiz: What do the following countries all have in common? Germany, United Kingdom, Japan, Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Canada, Sweden, Belgium, Australia, Bermuda, Venezuela, Ireland and Italy. Answer: They all invested in American assets last year - $811 billion, all told - according to Forbes (July 26). Daimler-Benz's purchase of Chrysler just put Germany in the No. 1 spot, but historically the No. 1 investor in America has been the United Kingdom. British companies invested $170 billion in American companies in 1998 and now hold $1.1 trillion in U.S. assets, according to the Forbes International 500. (In 1999, one of the deals in the U.K. portfolio was Meyer International's $98.7 million acquisition of RentX, in July - see page 20.) "Half of the world's 50 largest companies are domiciled outside the United States," Forbes points out; six of them are from the U.K. Forbes says the economic climate of the United States (i.e., encouragement of business investment) has improved by 33 percent since 1994; $10,000 invested then would be worth $31,500 now. The total U.S. national debt is 32 percent of gross domestic product; the total U.K. national debt is 50 percent of GDP. Americans are producing that GDP at the rate of $31,500 per capita; in the U.K., productivity is only $23,300 per capita. Unemployment in the United States is 4.5 percent; in the U.K., 6.6 percent. Retail sales in the United States: $6,300 per person; in the U.K., $5,400. The United States has 271 million people, fewer than half of whom have rented, compared to the U.K.'s 59 million, the great majority of whom have rented. And U.S. rental rates range as high as 10 times what they are in the U.K.

Does any of this suggest opportunity to you? It does to the British.

Sergei Khrushchev wants to become a U.S. citizen. "We like it here, and I believe that when you're living in a country like this, you have to become a citizen," Khrushchev said in USA Today May 26. He and his wife have been living here for eight years. Remember his dad, Nikita? The Soviet Union strongman from 1953 to 1964, who vowed to "bury" us? Meanwhile, back in the former USSR, people in Azerbaijan - that's out northwest of Iran, on the west side of Caspian Sea, if that helps pin it down some - have learned to read the bar codes on the bottoms of cell phones, in order to determine whether they were made in the U.S.A. If not, no dice - they want American. I was thinking, gee, it's sure a good thing we didn't blow each other up, back during the Cold War when both sides were so jumpy, always fingering their triggers.

This isn't a piece about detente or political theory, just a quick note of the fact that the globe has shrunk considerably already and keeps on shrinking. In this issue of RM we look at the World Wide Web, which is responsible for much of the shrinkage. If it is the destiny of rental to seep into all the corners and crannies of the Earth and help economies grow with the efficiency and opportunity that rental offers, the Internet will play a major role. But how? And when? "When" is easy: now. "How" is harder.