Is Wall Street Less Focused On Europe Than Earlier? [AUDIO]

Are Wall Street investors less concerned about Europe and its many challenges now than they were earlier? One Jersey expert says yes and no.

Mitchel Koza is the Distinguished Professor of Global Strategy at Rutgers. He says the U-S stock market may realize that there are so many global concerns competing for Wall Street's attention, Asia, Silicon Valley to name a few, that Europe is just part of the mix.

"I would not say that we have stopped looking at Europe, I think that there is real of mindfulness of the challenges that the European Union and its peripheral countries are facing.

Koza says Europe watchers see problems in Greece, Italy and Spain as an economic, "three-ring circus."

"I guess the real concern if we push the metaphor, is there's a sense that there's no real ringmaster there," he says.

He says the real challenge, of course, is that people are aware that today Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece have huge debt challenges that cannot be bailed out by the so-called, "core"...Germany, France and Britain.

Koza says Germany is emerging as the dominant economic actor if it already hasn't emerged as such.

He says there's several challenges there.

One, there's great belief amongst the leaders of Germany, including Angela Merkel and her people, that Germany must play a leading role. And yet there's also a great ambivalence from that generation that is not so far removed from World War Two, with people wondering should Germany actually take that role, and that's internal to Germany itself. They are still dealing with the integration of East and West Berlin, and that's been a challenge.

Koza says many on Wall Street have also come around to the belief that Europe's many financial and economic problems will not be finally solved only managed over time.