Quote from ASusilovic:
China and the Gulf states are hungry, and they've just sat down for an American buffet. In the last few months alone, state-affiliated funds and companies have taken bites of American icons, picking up small stakes in Advanced Micro Devices, MGM Mirage, Nasdaq Stock Market, Blackstone Group and Bear Stearns.
The deals were designed to be small enough to avoid scrutiny from the U.S. government. This conveniently played into the hands of sellers, who were able to offload pricey positions while giving virtually nothing in return, such as board seats or veto rights.
But the mergers-and-acquisitions story of 2008 will be how these foreign sovereign funds -- sitting on an estimated $2 trillion to $3 trillion of reserves -- direct their appetites. Fattened by the U.S.'s own trade imbalances and encouraged by favorable currency rates, they aren't likely to stay so compliant for long. Further down the buffet line sit entire U.S. companies.
Seven sovereign funds, including those of Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, China, Singapore and Russia, now sit on piles greater than $100 billion. Outside the U.S., these funds have proven more adventuresome, with a Dubai company recently moving to take ownership of the airport in Auckland, New Zealand.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119552149452198640.html?mod=mktw
From reading this thread, I think many of you may be missing the main point of foreign buyouts: multinational interdependence as a way of peace. (Btw, I don't necessarily agree with this - I'm just telling you how many of the elite think and act.)
Let me offer a quote from a Wharton paper:
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache...ignity+multinational&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us
"The dramatic expansion of the Multinational Enterprise (MNE) after 1960 produced a 'first wave' of literature in the popular and academic press...Suddenly, it seems the sovereign states are feeling naked. Concepts such as sovereignty and national economic strength appear curiously drained of meaning."
And consider these quotes
--Charles Kindleberger: "[the] nation-state is just about through as an economic unit."
--George Ball: "[the multinational corporation is] a modern concept evolved to meet the requirements of the modern age and the nation-state is a very old-fashioned idea and badly adapted to serve the needs of our present complex world".
In the eyes of many insiders, the mulitnational is placed on a pedestal and seen as a Bringer of Life, a Harbinger of Peace. If we interconnect the world through interdependence - and again 'interdependence' is the buzzword - we can finally achieve global peace. Again, to quote the above link:
"In 1991 John Stopford and Susan Strange argued that upheavals in the international political economy had resulted in a mutual interdependence which limits state's options...", i.e. war and other undesireable features of federal governments.
So imo you can forget about the US or any other major country ever "disentangling" itself from foreign multinational alliances because this is the very goal of many of our elites.
Example: If China, Russia and Saudi Arabia own a huge portion of our infrastructure, then they are much less likely to nuke us or fund terrorist activities. In fact, they will probably help us search out and destroy such enemies. Why do you think that terrorism has not spread more rapidly? It is undoubtedly because many of the wealthy Arabic elite have huge financial interests in the West.
This aspect of globalization is completely unavoidable at this point in the world's history and I have no doubt that the world will be a very different place geopolicially in a hundred years.
Here's a well-known quote from the "presitigous" Council on Foreign Relations member Gardner in 1974: ""The 'house of world order' will have to be built from the bottom up. ... An end run around sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault." "
The goal, by many at the top, is to slowly erode the nation state as we know it, using economic interdependence in order to create global peace and prosperity.
Your beauracracy working for you.
