China Is Buying the Chicago Stock Exchange. A Dangerous Signal for the Global Economy

Capital flight or capitol fight: Why is so much money fleeing China, and what is the biggest ramification?

An obscure Chinese company is buying the Chicago Stock Exchange. The February 5 announcement stirred a tumult on Capitol Hill. Members of both parties of Congress denounced the takeover, calling for the Treasury Department to investigate the proposed sale.

Yet the founder of the Chongqing Casin Enterprise Group (Casin Group), which is buying the Chicago Exchange, assured regulators that his intentions were purely financial in nature. He planned on keeping the United States management team in place and said he would use information learned from the Chicago Exchange “to help develop financial markets in China over the longer term and to bring exciting Chinese growth companies to U.S. investors.”

So what’s the problem?

Immoral Majority

12 years later, the problem has compounded… exponentially.

From 2004 with relevancy for today:

 

 

The red states may have won an election. But the blue states won the culture war.

If we couldn’t trust the exit polls to determine who would win the U.S. presidential election, why should we believe its post-election analysis? On Election Day, exit polls had liberal journalists in newsrooms all over the world positively giddy. Senator Kerry was projected to win easily. After he lost, the downcast media elite at least took comfort in the fact that, according to exit polls, it was the right-wing, homophobic Christians in the heartland of America that tilted the scales in favor of the incumbent.

Suddenly, America was ultra-religious—a “conservative” nation. It scared thousands of paranoid liberals enough to even consider the prospect of immigrating to Canada. Bloggers circulated maps of North America around the Internet with the West Coast and the Northeast shaded blue, along with Canada—collectively calling it “The United States of Canada.” Middle America, in red, was labeled “Jesusland.” New Yorkers and San Franciscans took offense at Middle America’s self-righteous disdain for the lifestyle and culture promoted on both coasts. The New York Times quoted one New Yorker as saying, “I’m saddened by what I feel is the obtuseness and shortsightedness of a good part of the country—the heartland. This kind of redneck, shoot-from-the-hip mentality and a very concrete interpretation of religion is prevalent in Bush country—in the heartland.”