Saturday, January 19, 2008

For Sale: Price reduced

And on the block is your country. As with other third world countries, the corporate sector of the industrialized world is finding plenty of bargains across our land.
For much of the world, the United States is now on sale at discount prices. With credit tight, unemployment growing and worries mounting about a potential recession, American business and government leaders are courting foreign money to keep the economy growing. Foreign investors are buying aggressively, taking advantage of American duress and a weak dollar to snap up what many see as bargains, while making inroads to the world’s largest market.

Last year, foreign investors poured a record $414 billion into securing stakes in American companies, factories and other properties through private deals and purchases of publicly traded stock, according to Thomson Financial, a research firm. That was up 90 percent from the previous year and more than double the average for the last decade. It amounted to more than one-fourth of all announced deals for the year, Thomson said.
The upside to this is the new foreign corporate owners are more interested in creating assets than in liquidating assets like their former owners were. The down side is that some of the buyers are actually the governments of such friendly nations as Saudi Arabia and China and probably Russia as well. So long as the money is green, all are welcome.

Comments:
My employer's CEO spends more time in China seeking money than here in the United States. I don't want to even *think* about how much of our company the Chinese own. As it is, we are not expanding at all here in the U.S., virtually all growth of our R&D staff is in China, with the U.S. R&D staff being dedicated primarily to planning and architecting the technological core of the product line w/China implementing.

And some people wonder why Americans don't go into engineering nowdays? Well, if our company is a clue, you can't get an engineering job if you are a new college grad in engineering -- unless you graduated from a Chinese college and speak fluent Mandarin and are willing to work at our facility in Shanghai. *Then* we'll hire you -- we've hired a couple dozen new college grads there in the last two years, and no (zero) new college grads in the U.S., indeed our U.S. developer staff averages 10+ years of experience in the field.
 

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