Foreign investor sharks circle U.S

"American companies are on sale," reporter Ben Steverman announced in Business Week last week. "Foreign buyers are circling, taking advantage of a weak U.S. dollar and a depressed stock market to snap up U.S. companies at discounted prices."

Steverman cited three recent high-visibility deals to prove his point:

• On July 13, Belgian brewer InBev acquired Anheuser-Bush, the owner of Budweiser and other well-known U.S. beers, for $52 billion. The deal prompted the Drudge Report to boast a headline proclaiming, "This Bud's for EU!"

• On July 21, Swiss biotech company Roche Holdings announced it would acquire the remaining shares of San Francisco-based biotech leader Genentech for $43.7 billion.

• On July 23, Japanese insurer Tokio Marine Holdings revealed plans to buy U.S. insurer Philadelphia Consolidated Holdings for $4.39 billion.
  

Last week, Red Alert announced GE and Mubadala Development Corporation, an investment arm of the government of the oil-exporting nation Abu Dhabi, had reached an agreement in which the Abu Dhabi Sovereign Wealth Fund would become one of GE's "top ten institutional investors," through a strategy of buying shares on the open market.

As WND reported, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, with estimated assets of $500 billion, last year invested $7.5 billion for a 4.9 percent equity stake in Citibank.

A different investment group, the Abu Dhabi Investment Council, announced earlier this month that it would buy a 90 percent in New York's historic Chrysler Building.

WND has reported a decision by the U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Affairs to quit publishing data on the amount of foreign investment in the United States.

This follows a decision in March 2006 by the Federal Reserve to stop publishing M3 data, a money-supply measure closely watched by economists.

The decision to quit publishing M3 data set the stage for the Federal Reserve to pump, without reporting as M3 data, some $500 billion into troubled banks and investment firms so far in 2008. It did this largely by holding rates low at a wide-open discount window and by a series of highly unusual multi-million dollar money auctions.

With the Commerce Department's decision to stop releasing data on foreign investment in the United States, many experts are concerned the Bush administration is setting the stage for an unprecedented amount of foreign investment to acquire U.S. corporate interests, high-visibility real estate and key infrastructure projects at discount prices, all without explicit summary data being reported in an easy-to-track manner.

Is the United States quietly being sold to foreign investors? Read more on Jerome Corsi's Red Alert, the premium, online intelligence news source by a best-selling author, WND staff writer and columnist.