Free Republic

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned international corporate media and world leaders like President Joe Biden for publicly predicting imminent war with Russia on Friday, stating that the panic caused by these statements cost Ukraine 12.5 billion hryvnia (about $437 million) in foreign investment. Zelensky spent nearly an hour and a half with reporters at a press conference in Kyiv on Friday following what has become a controversial phone conversation with President Biden on Thursday night. While the official readouts from both Washington and Kyiv depicted the call as productive and friendly, a CNN report based on anonymous sources described the...

Large-scale repatriations by US multinationals following tax reforms under President Donald Trump meant total foreign direct investment (FDI) in the Republic fell sharply in the first six months of 2018. New figures show that FDI in Ireland went into reverse in the first half of the year as many US companies moved to repatriate accumulated foreign earnings from their affiliates abroad. According to statistics from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), total FDI inflows to the State declined by $81 billion (€71 billion). With $2 billion of that accounted for by new investments, the figure for capital...

Germany’s economy minister on Saturday suggested tightening the rules on foreign investment, following concern over Chinese influence on European firms. Last month, it emerged that Chinese billionaire Li Shufu had quietly bought a near-10-percent stake worth around €7.2 billion ($8.9 billion) in German car giant Daimler — making him the group’s largest shareholder. “We must always adapt our law on the external economy according to new developments, including the threshold at which (the government) can become involved,” Economy Minister Brigitte Zypries told the weekly Der Spiegel. Currently, Berlin can scrutinize a transaction and possibly prevent it, if the foreign investor...

New York's famous Plaza Hotel is set to go on sale in an auction next month and experts believe that the five-star hotel could sell for more than $1billion. Billionaire brothers David and Simon Reuben hold the mortgage for the storied five-star hotel and scheduled a foreclosure auction for April 26. The auction was prompted after the hotel's 75 per cent owner Sahara India Pariwar — whose chairman went to prison in 2014 for defrauding investors — defaulted on loan agreements... < snip > Foreign investors are pouring capital into New York hotels at a historic rate. Much of the...

The Financial Repression Authority has consistently shown that Regulatory changes which "Ring Fence" US investors choices is a cornerstone of the Macro-Prudential Policy of "Financial Repression". Through stealth programs like FATCA and PFIC the US government has steadily and quietly limited Americans ability to take cash out of the country and to invest abroad, other than through profitable public exchange traded products sold by the financial industry. However, it is one thing to shut the doors to American investing abroad but it is quite another to fully open the doors to foreigners! It begs the question why, why now and...

It broke Ruth Freeborn’s heart to give up her U.S. citizenship that fateful day last year. Unfortunately for the Oklahoma native, though, it was either that, or her family. Ruth’s Canadian husband of 33 years, who earns all of the middle-class family’s income, “simply could not go along with this situation,” she explained. “To find myself suddenly not able to live, bank, save or to keep peace in my marriage while being American at the same time was shocking at first and deeply disturbing to me.” Ruth wrote “what must have been” hundreds of letters to U.S. senators and officials,...

A U.S. committee that reviews mergers between American companies and those overseas has given clearance to the proposed sale of Smithfield Foods Inc. to a Chinese company. Smithfield said Friday that the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States gave clearance for the pork producer to be acquired by Shuanghui International Holdings Limited. The committee reviews overseas transactions for national security implications. …

Zimbabwe’s long-serving president on Sunday threatened to expel foreign-owned companies over what he said was the West’s interference in the politics of the country he has led since 1980. President Robert Mugabe said he wanted no “ideas from London or Washington,” speaking before supporters at the funeral of a top military chief in Harare. He warned the Western powers that although his government hasn’t “done anything to your companies, time will come when we will say tit for tat.” He said: “You hit me, I hit you. We have a country to run and we must be left free to...

It’s not exactly news that Canada ranks among the world's top five energy producers. Currently, it is the third largest gas producer and holds the third-largest proven oil reserves. What is new, however, is that Canada for the first time last year became the top destination for Chinese investments abroad, beating out its southern neighbor, the US, the world’s biggest economy. While Chinese firms spent more than $20 billion in Canada—almost all of it in the energy sector—the US received just more than $10 billion, according to finance data specialist Dealogic. … In contrast to Canada’s traditional stance of openness...

Plans to create a neo-liberal start-up city in Honduras with its own laws, tax rules and police force suffered a setback on Friday when the economic guru who inspired the project said he has been unable to act as its guarantor and watchdog.

Located at the northern tip of Mitkof Island, where the icy waters of the Frederick Sound meet the Wrangell Narrows, the Alaskan city of Petersburg is about as remote as they come. However even this wilderness with its wolves, black bear, moose and humpback whales, is within range of an expansion of Mexican-owned business that is reaching the furthest corners of the US. At the supermarket in Petersburg you can pick up a telephone from TracFone, a virtual mobile operator controlled by billionaire Carlos Slim. Over the past five years or so, Mexican companies have poured billions of dollars into...

President Barack Obama will call for cutting the top 35 percent corporate tax rate as early as this month, according to two sources close to the administration. The president is likely to propose a rate closer to an average of that seen in peer nations, the sources said. This would jibe with remarks made last year by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who suggested the United States should be moving to a rate more in line with its major trading partners in the high 20-percent range. Obama outlined tax measures - including closing tax loopholes for companies that move facilities and...

China wants to convert some of its mountain of U.S. government debt into investment in renovating American roads and subways, the commerce minister said Friday. Speaking to a business group, Chen Deming said China wants closer co-operation with the United States in infrastructure, clean energy and technology. Such investments would tie China more closely to Western economies and might help defuse fears Beijing will use its $3.2-trillion in foreign reserves -- some $1.15-trillion of that in Treasury and other U.S. government debt -- as a political weapon. “We hope to achieve cooperation in the area of infrastructure,” Chen told members...

Copy China and invest abroad, says Medvedev By Catherine Belton in Moscow Published: January 31 2008 19:19 | Last updated: January 31 2008 19:19 Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s most likely next president, called on Russian business people on Thursday to copy China and go on a global buying spree of foreign companies to bolster the economy and cut dependence on technology from abroad. In his first speech to Russian big business since being named by Vladimir Putin as his preferred successor, Mr Medvedev pledged Kremlin support for companies seeking assets abroad. “This is a very important task. The majority of powerful...

Soros Fund Management has appointed a former BlackRock co-founder, who left last month to start his own fund, as its new chief investment officer. Keith Anderson stepped down as BlackRock’s chief investment officer for fixed income in December ostensibly to start his own fund. In his new role he will manage all investment activites at Soros Fund, according to a letter sent to Soros shareholders yesterday.

Road plans in Texas have conspiracy theorists in an uproar I am driving along a mostly empty road in rural Fayette County, Texas, about an hour east of Austin, looking for the NAFTA superhighway -- the one that Stephen Harper, George W. Bush and Felipe Calderón mocked as a conspiracy theory when they were asked about it at their trilateral meeting in Montebello, Que., in August. Critics, who say that behind the leaders' denials lurks a larger, nefarious plan to unite North America, fear that such a roadway will eventually be a four-football-stadium-wide artery connecting Mexico, the U.S. and Canada,...

Monitoring the court fight between activist Terri Hall and the Texas Department of Transportation is a lot like staring at a buffet line full of warmed over hospital cafeteria food. On the one hand, you're hungry and interested in eating. But on the other, you really can't get excited about the choices before you. It's tempting but unpalatable to root for Hall, who has adopted the noble cause of trying to stop TxDOT from spending millions of dollars on a PR blitz to build support for toll roads. Despite Hall's impressive gifts of organizing, public speaking and rabble-rousing, she is...

...[The building of the Trans-Texas Corridor] is all too sinister for Jerome Corsi, the Vietnam War veteran who helped lead the Swift Boat charge against John Kerry. Corsi has knitted disparate strands of each of these separate road projects to help convince fellow xenophobes such as Pat Buchanan, Phyllis Schlafly, Lou Dobbs and the John Birch Society that the corridor is the first leg of a secret federal project called the NAFTA Superhighway, a four-football-field wide monstrosity that would run from Mexico's Yucatan to Canada's Yukon... Yet even Texas Rep. Ron Paul, a libertarian Republican candidate for president, has fallen...

EuroMoney PLC, the UK-based company that arranges dozens of financial conferences around the world each year, has refused to allow WND staff reporter Jerome Corsi to attend next week's "North American PPP (Public-Private Partnership) & Infrastructure Finance Conference" in New York, even though WND offered to pay the $1,999 conference fee required to attend. "When government officials want to go behind closed doors with investment bankers and lawyers to discuss selling our public infrastructure to foreign investment leaders, investigative reporters need to be there to tell the public what is really going on,” Corsi said. "Why is it that all...

The nation's transportation experts have identified their top three priorities: a national freight network, urban congestion and connecting new urban centers with the interstate system. The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, meeting in national conference last month, heard futurists predict that the cost of meeting the transportation needs would be $3.1 trillion over the next 25 years. State and local governments are turning to "public-private partnerships," or PPPs, to produce the funding. The city of Chicago was happy to partner with a Spanish-Australian group that paid $1.83 billion for a 99-year lease to operate the Chicago Skyway....