be afraid....

Nov. 30, 2007—[Republican SEC Chief] Cox plans to discuss how the increase in investments by foreign government investment funds, which manage between $2 trillion and $3 trillion in asserts, may “fundamentally change how markets work.” Cox says they could particularly affect US regulatory structure… His stance breaks with the administration and IMF, which has agreed only to study the phenomenon. WSJ A8

--In the past three months alone, Dubai International Capital purchased a minority stake in Sony; another investment arm of Abu Dhabi took an 8% stake in the semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices and a 7.5% stake in the private-equity group Carlyle; Citic Securities, a Chinese state bank, took a stake in credit-troubled Bear Stearns; Dubai's stock exchange purchased a major share of both the Nasdaq and the London Stock Exchange; the Chinese government took a stake in the Blackstone group; and last but certainly not least, another arm of the Dubai government bought the New York fashion emporium Barney's. This is only a sampling of the deals done, and in all likelihood a small subset of the deals to come. … The weak dollar is clearly a factor, and has enhanced the buying power of many foreign buyers. Of course the dollar has weakened in part because the U.S. is both a huge debtor and a large consumer of global goods, and that weakness is yet one more reason why our assets are so attractive at current prices. Simplistically, the system would say: Money goes out as we borrow and spend, and then comes back in the form of investments into our economy by the people we're borrowing and buying from. But then there's culture and politics and national identity, and that makes it not so simple. Finally, let's address the elephant in the living room: Many in the U.S. simply aren't comfortable with increased dependency on either the Middle East or China. Whatever the merits of those concerns, the interdependence of the global economy is a fact. As it stands, the sovereign wealth funds that are so eagerly investing in both the U.S. and throughout the world are controlled by groups that embrace the global capital system rather than others who might reject it. In life, in business and in international affairs, you don't usually have the luxury of selecting the perfect allies. For much of the 20th century, the U.S. could maintain the illusion that we would only work with states and groups that we liked and who we thought liked us. That may have been true then; it isn't true now. We had better get used to it. –WSJ A17

--The largest number of adolescents in history of coming of age world-wide. WSJ B1