[rib3ye]

I see many comments here saying “but stock market went up” while ignoring the bare bone problem Buffett is presenting: Disproportionate foreign ownership of US assets harms American sovereignty.

The issue may be that sovereignty is hard to measure, but I think we have been complaining about the long-tail effects for a while:

- wealth inequality (as businesses become optimized on foreign labor, execs are paid more and workers less)

- job security (volatility for investor class means sudden job cuts or offshoring)

- asset inflation in real estate (no one can afford a freakin house)

- WAR (we have an obligation to defend our debt owners in the Middle East)

Every time the public trust gets violated, we lose a small piece of our future.

[tim333]

In theory but compared with 2003 when that was written I'd say American sovereignty has increased. In Europe and most places we buy from Amazon, search with Google, the computers run Windows or MacOS, the phones run US software etc. It's more the US owning abroad than abroad owning the US.