One of the flaws in a capitalist system is the balancing act a government needs to walk to maintain security but not stifle business. You want to maintain security, but how do you keep from interfering with a companies and their right to buy and sell property. Case in point the Dubai ports deal a situation where the White House argued strongly for the deal, but thankfully congress intervened. Of course what drew little attention is someone had already dropped the ball and let a Great Britain firm purchase the ports years before. I guess having a foreign power in charge of port security is ok, as long as it's the right foreign power. Surprisingly the public paid little attention to Dubais purchase of a major defense contractor (Doncasters Group Limited).

Now the ports deal is a fairly straightforward and easy to understand for the average citizen. What is less clear is the current firestorm over the Dubai attempt to purchase 19.9% of the Nasdeq exchange. To quote Joe Everyman who really cares who owns the exchange? To an extent this is correct, the SEC keeps the management of Nasdaq and the NYSE under tight reigns, but there are more subtle changes that the management of the exchange has sway over. Voting on the mergers and acquisitions of other companies for example, policies concerning the volume and mechanism of trading, even who gets listed on the exchange. Even more insidious you could merely run the exchange into the ground, a generally weakening of the us economy. Remember stock traders are lemmings, a slide in one exchange will frequently cause a mass exodus on others.

The threat of such a measure is leverage in policy discussions as is China's heavy investing in US banking. This type of story is seen as far less interesting than the current antics of OJ or Paris Hilton so it's barely reported. Economic warfare is still warfare, other counties act accordingly it is time we did as well.