Reverse Globalization
In Greeley, An Ironic Immigration Twist
By Richard Martin, 5-31-07
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For connoisseurs of irony, it doesn’t get much better than the news that a Brazilian conglomerate will buy Greeley-based Swift & Co. Swift’s Colorado meatpacking plants were the site of the federal immigration raids last December that divided the community of Greeley and resulted in the arrests of dozens and the loss of 1300 people from Swift’s workforce. Virtually all of those workers were Hispanic; now a Latin American firm is Swift’s new owner.
“It’s kind of ironic,” Rutilio Martinez, an associate professor at the University of Northern Colorado’s Monfort College of Business, told the Rocky Mountain News.
This deal is a leading example of “reverse globalization” – the “uphill flow” of capital from developing economies to the West.
“Reverse globalization - when you have emerging market players going out and acquiring developed institutions - is a tide that no matter how you try to swing against it, will be very very prevalent in the years to come,” Nasser al-Shaali, chief executive of the Dubai International Financial Center (DIFC) Authority, said recently. That tide is swelled by the inconvenient truth that the U.S. has in recent years become one of the world’s biggest debtor nations.
Reverse capital flows are often seen as likely to come from China, which has a booming economy, a runaway stock market, and high personal savings rates. But Brazil has enjoyed strong economic growth also – and its tycoons have obviously begun eyeing American assets.
“Rather than lend their money out to American and European investors—or take a stake in US private equity firms, as some [Persian] Gulf families are known to do,” commented Brad Setser on the RGE Monitor blog recently, “some emerging market economies might use their own funds to go shopping for American and European firms.”
That’s now happening. And in Northern Colorado, it has added an ironic turn to the immigration dispute that continues to divide this country.
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Comments
Thanks a huge bunch for at least touching on the nasty subject of reverse globalization. I say "touching on" simply because I think if books were written on that subject matter, completely and all-inclusively, they would fill a library from wall to wall.
Acquiring developed institutions is only the tip of the iceberg. If you want to reeeaaalllly visit FEAR, all you'd have to do is add in all the real estate in the USA that is now entirely and completely owned by foreign persons or foreign companies and you won't sleep very well for a very long period of time ~ if EVER again.
I keep repeating "... without a shot being fired" as the method long in progress for all citizens of the USA to loose all that is grand and glorious about this marvelous Nation we too often take for granted. Sometimes it seems to me as though we've got a sawed-off shotgun firing at our own feet.
Along with foreign business interests who are purchasing or controlling the skeleton of our Nation comes a huge political influence. Their lobbying efforts and their readily available funds filter, one way or the other, into the pockets of Congress and other ruling or regulating entities within our shores.
Right this minute we are witnessing not only these outright purchases within our Nation but we are also witnessing persons who have broken our laws to enter ~ millions of them, as you know ~ who are even now being allowed to march down our main streets waving the flags of another country, all the while *demanding* "their rights". Unless you possess a Get Out of Jail Free Card, perhaps you, too, resent their liberty to do so.
Packaged in the entirety of it all, the word "irony" may take a back seat to the word "threat"???
... or so it seems to me ...