No. of Recommendations: 5
About Buffett's 2003 article and proposals, Mungofitch writes:
Admittedly it has the advantages he claims: ... These are all head and shoulders above recent developments. But ... It is provincial and protectionist in all the most blind ways: lamenting the ownership of US businesses by foreigners while not noticing that US investors own very comparable amounts of all non-US businesses, for example, and thus skipping the rather startling observation that US investors reap very much higher returns on their non-US investments than non-US investors do on their US investments.I concluded, among other things, that Buffett's proposals seemed more like "capital controls" (where debt and equity in the US is not purchasable by foreigners) than like Tariffs. And looked at as a Tariff, it was a closed system where all the revenues from the "Tariffs" on imports were spent to subsidize American Exports. I had ChatGPT clean up my thoughts and published them here:
https://kazart.blogspot.com/In 2003, the foreign ownership that Buffett provincially bemoaned was $2.5Trillion more ownership by foreigners of US debt and equity than American's owned of Foreign debt and equity. In 2025, that difference is more like $25Trillion, amounting to about 1/7 the "Market Cap" of the USA being owned by Foreigners without a countervailing amount of equity owned by American's in the rest of the world.
I guess I am more provincial and protectionist myself in 2025 than Buffett was in 2003. But I would very much like to have it explained to me just why neither Buffett nor I ought to be concerned with, as Buffett put it, selling and/or mortgaging pieces of the country off to support THIS generation's consumption at the cost of some future generation having to pay foreigners rent for living in the USA.
Thank you in advance,
R:/
