I wonder what it might mean if extrapolated into China eventually buying the lions share of houses, farms, companies, infrastructure, educational institutions..
What would be the outcome?
It’s sort of weird that such buyup isn’t seen as a national security issue.
The US acquired practically zero infrastructure in Europe over the last 70 years and practically zero of Europe's farming output. Europe as a whole is notoriously protective of its farming, both in terms of ownership and tariff protection.
Trains/rail, bus systems, power generation, power distribution, telecom - US companies own an extroardinarily tiny share of those things in Europe overall.
Verizon + AT&T are worth ~$420 billion and are giant, wildly profitable businesses. Why don't they own most of Europe's telecom industry, which is mostly dominated by numerous far smaller companies? Because it doesn't work that way. You can't just go into a dozen European nations and buy up all of their telecom, the government roadblocks to doing that make it impossible. Instead, it's Softbank (Japan) that owns Sprint (#4), and it's Deutsche Telekom that owns T-Mobile that is the #3 telecom carrier in the US.
It refers to an American Investor buying up a European company, destroying it in some way (e.g. by using its voting power to force the company to sell all its assets and take on lots of debt, then pay out all that to the investor), and then letting the company go bankrupt.
It’s been a common scheme of American investors in Europe in the 2000s, and has destroyed many local companies, which in turn meant that their marketshare was afterwards taken over by American multinationals.
It was such a common incidence that it became main topic of political debates for a while.
What would be the outcome?
It’s sort of weird that such buyup isn’t seen as a national security issue.