California Conservative

AP reports: “The furor over efforts by an Arab company to buy U.S. port operations has focused attention on a little noticed economic fact of life: America increasingly is foreign-owned.”

Oh no. What will the port critics say now?

From the ritzy Essex House hotel in Manhattan, owned by the Dubai Investment Group, to the nationwide chains of Caribou Coffee and Church’s Chicken, owned by another company serving Arab investors, foreigners are buying bigger and bigger chunks of the country.

The U.S. must borrow more than $2 billion per day from foreigners to finance its huge trade deficits. In 2005, for example, there was a record deficit of $805 billion in the current account, the broadest measure of trade.

Foreigners sell their televisions, cars and oil to Americans and hold dollars in return. Those dollars are invested in stocks, bonds and other assets, including real estate and factories.

Foreigners already own half of the U.S. government’s publicly traded debt. As of January, some $2.19 trillion in Treasury securities were in the hands of central banks, including China and Japan, and private investors abroad.

Will Hillary Clinton, Chuck Shumer and all the others be equally outspoken about this news? Unlikely.

What can be done? Buy American. It’s a good start.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 20th, 2006 at 9:58 am and is filed under California, Culture, Domestic Policies, Economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.