@newspaperarticle {67691,
	title = {Sale of the Century},
	year = {2011},
	month = {Feb 20, 2011},
	publisher = {History News Network},
	abstract = {In my favorite spaghetti western, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, there 
is a memorable scene that sums up the world economy today. Blondie 
(Clint Eastwood) and Tuco (Eli Wallach) have finally found the cemetery 
where they know the gold is buried. Trouble is, they{\textquoteright}re in a vast Civil 
War graveyard, and they don{\textquoteright}t know where to find the loot. Eastwood 
looks at his gun, looks at Wallach, and utters the immortal line: {\textquotedblleft}In 
this world, there are two kinds of people, my friend. Those with loaded 
guns {\textellipsis} and those who dig.{\textquotedblright}
In the post-crisis economic order, there are likewise two kinds of 
economies. Those with vast accumulations of assets, including sovereign 
wealth funds (currently in excess of $4 trillion) and hard-currency 
reserves ($5.5 trillion for emerging markets alone), are the ones with 
loaded guns. The economies with huge public debts, by contrast, are the 
ones that have to dig. The question is, just how will they dig their way
 out?...
The U.S. needs to do exactly what it would if it were a severely indebted company: sell off assets to balance its books.
There are three different arguments against such asset sales. The first 
concerns national security. When Dubai Ports World bought the shipping 
company P\&amp;O in 2006{\textemdash}which would have given it control of facilities 
in a number of U.S. ports{\textemdash}the deal was killed in Congress in a fit of 
post-9/11 paranoia. The second argument is usually made by unions: 
private or foreign owners will be tougher on American workers than good 
old Uncle Sam. Finally, there{\textquoteright}s the chauvinism that surfaced back in the
 1980s when the Japanese were snapping up properties like Pebble Beach. 
How could the United States let its national treasures{\textemdash}the family 
silver{\textemdash}fall into the hands of inscrutable Asian rivals?
Such arguments were never very strong. Now, in the midst of the biggest 
crisis of American public finance since the Civil War, they simply 
collapse....},
	url = {http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/136802.html},
	author = {Ferguson, Niall}
}
