主题：【原创】美国巨额赤字没有那么可怕 -- 不忘中国

Good points.

However, there are several things missing here (for the sake of discussion):

1) The US assets invested by foreign investors include not only equity, but also bonds, real estate and businesses. And this is the concept defined in the article and well-accepted by the market.

2) Cash purchasing is account for a small portion of M&A in the world wide capital markets. Usually, the liquidity is measured by many other indicators, both in the corporate and national level, not just by how much cash in the B/S.

3) The business model of Enron is based on the energy derivatives. It still makes perfect sense in today’s energy markets, like crude oil, electricity and gas. The real problem is the corporate governance rather than the risk management mechanism. However, the derivative markets based on US assets are so huge that any liquidity squeezing or confidence swing could cause hundreds of billions of loss in invested money. LTCM is a perfect example.

4) Cash crunch doesn’t necessary mean bankruptcy, particularly in US. Even when a corporation files Chapter 7 or Chapter 11, both rules provide a whole bunch of alternatives. However, there is no such protection existing for a country like US.

5) Risk premium is just a technical word in modern finance theory. It even has three definitions according to the main stream finance academics. The risk premium is only one part of the equation used to calculate the asset value. Another three parts are, cash flows, risk free interest rate and the time periods. FED controls the RF rate, cash flows and time period depend on many external factors, like regulation and management capability. Risk premium also has part of the psychological issues.

So I don’t fully agree with you that cash crunch and risk premium are the keys to understand corporate or capital markets. On the national level, they are even tiny things, in particular to the U.S.