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Unrestricted Warfare. Morgan Stanley is succumbing. Selling itself to China.
Foreign government owned investment funds are much bigger
than all the world's hedge funds combined. Oil money (Middle
East) and trade surplus money (China) generate the incomparable
wealth. When big U.S.
financial firms get into trouble, foreign governments buy them.
Morgan Stanley lost a boatload of money this year and is now selling 5% of itself to China's government.
Citi sold a 4.9 percent stake to Abu Dhabi’s investment arm, while
UBS sold stakes to the Singapore government and an unnamed Middle
Eastern investor.
But Morgan Stanley made happy talk about it:
“We are delighted to welcome CIC [China Investment Corporation] as a long-term investor in Morgan
Stanley, and believe it is an important step in increasing the flow of
capital between our countries and across these increasingly critical
markets,” Mr. Mack said in the statement. “The investment from CIC will
help to strengthen our deep ties in these growth markets and ensure
that Morgan Stanley has the resources necessary to pursue growth
opportunities globally across our Institutional Securities, Global
Wealth Management and Asset Management businesses into 2008 and beyond.”
Chinese military officers wrote a book called Unrestricted Warfare
in 1999. Their names are Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, two
People's Liberation Army senior colonels. They said this:
Can using financial instruments to destroy a country's economy be seen as a battle?
And they thought about Morgan Stanley, explicitly:
In addition, we have yet to mention the crowd of large and small
speculators who have come en masse to this huge dinner party for money
gluttons, including Morgan Stanley and Moody's, which are famous for
the credit rating reports that they issue, and which point out
promising targets of attack for the benefit of the big fish in the
financial world [see Endnote 14].
The officers contemplated the 1990's Southeast Asian financial crisis:
A surprise financial war attack that was deliberately planned and
initiated by the owners of international mobile capital ultimately
served to pin one nation after another to the ground--nations that not
long ago were hailed as "little tigers" and "little dragons."
And concluded this:
Financial warfare has now officially come to war's center stage--a
stage that for thousands of years has been occupied only by soldiers
and weapons, with blood and death everywhere. We believe that before
long, "financial warfare" will undoubtedly be an entry in the various
types of dictionaries of official military jargon.
Has Morgan Stanley now succumbed to the financial warfare?
Taken over on the battlefield? It was so smooth, so easy, nobody
got hurt.
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