America For Sale

[movie zombie]

long but interesting article re our national deficit, future trade, and more importantly the selling of american infrustructure built with tax payer dollars.

"Roads and bridges built by U.S. taxpayers are starting to be sold off, and so far foreign-owned companies are doing the buying," reported the Associated Press on July 15. At present the main foreign players in these deals are companies based in Australia and Spain. But as China accumulates ever-increasing quantities of depreciating dollars, it will start looking for tangible goods in which to invest those dollars. And as we will see, some analysts in this country are suggesting that we should welcome Chinese "direct investment" in our country as a way of closing our imponderably huge "fiscal gap."


"The federal government keeps two sets of books," noted USA Today for August 3. "The set the government promotes to the public has a healthier bottom line: a $318 billion deficit in 2005." An "audited financial statement produced by the government''s accountants following standard accounting rules" discloses that the actual deficit for 2005 was $760 billion," continues the paper. And if the costs of Social Security and Medicare were included in the total, as any honest accounting would require, "the federal deficit would have been $3.5 trillion."


"Another possibility presents itself, however: China could use its dollar hoard to buy valuable assets within the United States. In other words, rather than dumping its dollars, China could use them to buy up the United States."


http://www.thenewamerican.com/artman/publish/article_4163.shtml


lots of food for thought.


movie zombie

 

[strmrdr]

Just like the Japanese and the British before them...
The British still own more than all the rest combined.

 

[CaptAubrey]

I seem to recall horror stories like this during the ''80s, except it was the Japanese buying everything in sight.

What no one seemed to realize at the time--though it''s obvious in retrospect--was that much of what they were buying was for sale for a reason, and a lot of these Japanese investors got taken like rubes at a county fair.

I expect similar things will happen to the Chinese.

 

[fire&ice]

Yeah, the Japanese were buying "trophy" building for ridiculous sums of money. Pro forma should have been a little more important. Many properties were sieged by the banks. I''m not sure which properties they bought - big ones in NYC - Chrysler, Empire, Plaza Hotel?

 

[strmrdr]

google Japanese buy and sell Rockefeller center.

edit numbers were off but they took a dunking on it....