A $500B/year trade deficit. We trade real estate for cheaply made trinkets. I have a friend in CA, he said his street is being bought up by Chinese investors.
Note to self: This is never a good idea.
This reminds me of all the stories we heard a few years ago when states were selling off toll roads, and all of the buyers were foreign companies. There was plenty of whining and gnashing of teeth here on FR, with the predictable complaints that we were "selling the country to foreigners."
The lack of interest by American buyers should have been a huge warning sign to those foreign investors. They could have saved themselves a lot of trouble if they had paid more attention to "local sentiment" in the market ... because many of those roads were later sold off when the original buyers went bankrupt.