U.S. Burying Foreign Money Trail

The United States' Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) will stop publishing a key report tracking foreign direct investments (FDI) into the U.S. Through the discontinuation of the BEA’s “New Investment Series,” the U.S. government and the American public will no longer be able to distinguish between FDI used to acquire existing U.S. assets from FDI used to establish new U.S. businesses.

With the U.S. no longer following the foreign money trail, the American public will cease to have the ability to track the rapid sell-off of America’s best companies to foreign interests, essentially burying the problematic fact that America is for sale.

Anheuser-Busch's recent foreign acquisition by Belgium conglomerate InBev illustrates the enormous flaw in canceling the policy. The $52 billion acquisition by InBev is currently counted as FDI used to purchase existing U.S. assets rather than FDI used to start a new business. With the amended 2009 policy, however, the U.S. government will not distinguish between the two.

The BEA’s decision to cease publishing FDI comes at a time when America’s concerns over losing our best wealth producing companies are higher than ever, given our current catastrophic sell-off trend.

In the past 15 years, only $200 billion (10 percent) of the $2 trillion in FDI into the U.S. has been used to create new businesses while more than $1.8 trillion has been used simply to acquire existing U.S. firms, their patents, brands and worldwide assets.

On July 30, 38 organizations representing U.S. manufacturing, labor, and agricultural interests sent a letter to four congressional committees urging the BEA to reverse its decision. They also requested that the BEA report detailed FDI data for all countries possessing either state-owned or controlled companies or sovereign wealth funds.

The organizations further noted that the BEA neglected to report FDI data for countries like China, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates, Russia and others with burgeoning state-owned and controlled companies and/or sovereign wealth fund coffers in its June press release. Today the world’s sovereign wealth funds are estimated to be $3.3 trillion and growing.

Moreover, the money available to state-owned and controlled enterprises is much larger. For the American public to be able to weigh the policy consequences of the growing power of these state-controlled enterprises and funds, it is imperative to have full disclosure of any FDI from those countries and their individual state-owned companies and funds.

Through our continued pattern of selling off our means of production, we are witnessing the extinction of the American company. We have switched to a service (servant) economy, forcing ourselves to become more reliant on imports and debt. Without the ability to support ourselves, we are rendering ourselves incompetent in the global arena.

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