Английский язык в экономике, бухучете и банковско-финансовой деятельности. В. И. Иванов

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СКАЧАТЬ 1840s and the mid-1870s, major defaults on these securities soured European investors.

      When Americans started to build railroads, it became necessary to raise added moneys abroad because U.S. savings were inadequate. New mines and cattle ranches also attracted European (especially British) moneys, as did mineral processing, meat packing, and flour making. In the early twentieth century, British, German, Dutch, French, and other foreign investors produced a variety of goods and services in America (including rayon, the first synthetic fabric, Mercedes cars, oil by Royal-Dutch Shell, and Michelin tires). With the large inflow of capital, America became the world’s greatest debtor nation.

      Meanwhile, American businesses began to move abroad. In the colonial era, merchants had set up overseas units. During the nineteenth century, the number of enterprises abroad mounted slowly. Then, from the 1870s onward, as American companies grew at home, they also expanded over national borders. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modern American multinational enterprises had emerged. Standard Oil of New Jersey, Singer, International Harvester, Western Electric, and by 1914, Ford Motor Company had major producing facilities outside the United States. Although foreign investment in the United States was of both a portfolio nature (investment in bonds and shares and bank lending that did not carry control) and of a direct investment nature (investment that carried management and control), the former was predominant; U.S. stakes abroad also consisted of both types, but foreign direct investment was supreme. The reason was that surplus capital in America was used at home. Thus, even while America was the great recipient of capital from abroad, its businesses were entering and growing in foreign lands, seeking new markets and sources of supply.

      World War I was the watershed. The British sold American assets to finance the war, and German investments in America ended when the United States entered the war. The demand for capital abroad rose, and now Americans supplied it. American banks, once intermediaries in bringing capital to the United States, had developed the skills and contacts to play the opposite role – to dispatch U.S. moneys worldwide. Europe looked to America for loans to buy weapons. In 1917–1918 U.S. government lending became very important. Latin America attracted new U.S. business investments. Overnight, as it were, America was transformed into a creditor nation.

      Businesses continued to expand in the 1920s and so did American lending. Excluding the U.S. intergovernmental credits, and with 1929 possibly an exception, American direct investment abroad always exceeded portfolio investment until the 1970s. During the 1930s, American lenders abroad faced major defaults and multinationals encountered difficulties. In 1934 the Johnson Act made it unlawful for U.S. bankers to lend to countries in default on U.S. government loans. World War II posed added hazards for international investors. In its aftermath, America emerged as economically strong and as the great creditor nation, the only economic giant in the world. Marshall Plan aid was vital to European recovery. Soon, American multinationals were spreading worldwide on a scale that dwarfed their past history. During the 1960s the American challenge – American investment accompanied by American technology – seemed unmatched.

      While America was a creditor nation, foreign stakes in the United States were overshadowed. Yet they never entirely disappeared. Some foreign companies that had investments in the United States before 1914 remained and grew in size, and there were new entries. Certain portfolio holdings persisted and others were newly made. Indeed by the time of World War II, foreign investment had attained its 1914 level, even though the amounts were exceeded by U.S. investment abroad. After the Second World War, foreign investment in the United States was very much in the background.

      In the 1970s, as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (opec) pushed oil prices up, its government members had capital surpluses that could not be absorbed into their domestic economies; these moneys were placed with U.S. banks and recycled into third world debt. With the new sources of funds, the character of American investment abroad changed. From being overwhelmingly investment by multinationals, it became increasingly made up of bank loans.

      Americans, for balance of payments reasons, had sought to encourage foreign investment in the United States in the 1960s; by the 1970s and early 1980s, an awareness emerged of rising inward investment. America was both politically stable and provided a formidable market. While much of the new investment came from European (especially British, Dutch, and German) sources – often stimulated by the decline in the dollar after 1971–1973, which made American assets cheaper to foreign buyers – what attracted special concern was the newly conspicuous holdings of Arab investors and later of the Japanese.

      Suddenly, in the mid-1980s, seemingly overnight, the United States had switched from net creditor to net debtor status in international accounts. And once again, by the end of the decade, America had become the world’s greatest debtor nation. The transitions of 1914–1918 and the mid-1980s had been rapid, yet in each case the foundations had been laid in prior years. Despite much unhappy talk about «foreign multinationals in America» – especially the Japanese «invasion» – foreign investors still had their holdings mainly in liquid assets, portfolio investments. And, as during most of American history, it was still the British who had the largest investments. Moreover, as foreign investment in America grew, U.S. investment abroad persisted and direct investments expanded.

      Historically, Americans were always ambivalent about foreign investment. This was true before 1914 when, on the one hand, there was the wish for foreign capital to finance the railroads and, on the other, a deep resentment against British investors. So, too, in many parts of the world, American investment over the years provoked a «can’t live with it and can’t live without it» state of mind – hated for its symbolic «alien» implications and yet desired for its positive contributions. As sizable foreign investment in the United States took place in the 1970s and 1980s, it was both courted by state governments that wanted more employment within their jurisdictions and lambasted by critics who saw «America for Sale.» Despite economic integration worldwide, nations, the United States included, retained – as in times past – a mixed response toward outsiders’ investments.

      Mira Wilkins, The Emergence of Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad from the Colonial Era to 1914 (1970); Mira Wilkins, The History of Foreign Investment in the United States to 1914 (1989); Mira Wilkins, The Maturing of Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad from 1914 to 1970 (1974).

      Mira Wilkins

      EXERCISES

      Exercise 1. Words and expressions. Provide Russian equivalents.

      borrow v.

      direct investments

      debtor nation

      assets

      creditor country

      intermediary

      to fund national and state debts

      moneys

      company’s stock

      intergovernmental credits

      securities

      in default on loans

      holdings

      OPEC

      default on securities

      funds

      added moneys

      capital surplus

      raise money

      encourage foreign investment

      inflow of capital

      liquid СКАЧАТЬ