economyincrisis.org has a list of the U.S. Businesses that have been sold to Foreign companies.
We speak, of course, about foreign money. At our current rate of trade and budget deficits, foreigners need to purchase $2 billion in dollar-denominated assets each day just to keep the dollar stable, said Axel Merk, who manages $60 million at Merk Investments and runs the Merk Hard Currency Fund. Over half the national debt is now financed by foreigners, according to Roger Ibbotson, chairman of the financial consulting firm Ibbotson Associates in Chicago and a professor at Yale School of Management. That's been true since 1980, but the difference now, he says, "is the scale of the game."
"I guess everyone wants to keep this game going," Ibbotson said. But if one of the countries we're most dependent on drops out, it could be "like a bank run." David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's, is also concerned. "If this money stopped coming, the dollar would take a dive and U.S. bond yields would have to come up. That would constrain capital spending and housing and slow down the U.S. economy."
This is just stunning! Heare is the list of the
Top 20 Industries that have been sold to foreign businesses.
The top 10 states are:
California,
New York,
Illinois,
Texas,
New Jersey,
Massachusetts,
Pennsylvania,
Michigan,
Ohio, and
Connecticut.
The most shocking thing from the site is the
list of the top 20 countries that are buying. I would have never guessed that the top 5 would look like this:
1. United Kingdom
2. Germany
3. Canada
4. France
5 Netherlands
China is not even on the list!
You can see the
entire list of companies and pick your brain off of the floor.
Some argue that the waterfall of foreign money has also prettied up U.S. Treasuries. A study released as part of the Federal Reserve Board's International Finance Working Papers Series asserts that the yield on 10-year Treasury notes would be a full percentage point less without abnormally high flows into bonds. That's because increased demand for U.S. Treasuries have pushed the yield on Treasuries lower than it would be otherwise. Normally, Wyss said, foreign investors would be reluctant to stake so much on the Treasury market because they would be worried that a decline in the dollar would erode their returns. But, in recent years, the Japanese and Chinese central banks have intervened to keep the dollar high. "Central banks have trained investors that there's not much risk there," he said. "That scares me."