Please do not sell US assets at bargain basement prices!

Sir reading John Gapper’s “America must live with being a bargain basement” December 1, and the sale of 4.9 percent of Citigroup to an investment arm of the Abu Dhabi government, it somehow led me to think about the “Memoirs of a Geisha” that describes the creation of a vicious competitive bidding process in order to maximize the value of a young girl's virginity. I just wonder whether if someone had previously set a maximum limit to how much of a Citigroup could be sold to middle east countries before being blocked similar to how the takeover of some US ports were one would not have been able to generate that scarcity value that could have led the investor to gladly fork out at least twice what they paid for those shares. Sincerely, in these days when we read of billions of run away losses in a world that has no idea where to invest, one could believe that the shares of the bank that never sleeps in the US and that is one of those that has seemingly become too large to fail should be worth a bit more.

There are other strengths in the US of course but the assets of America are the main line of defence when it comes to hold up the value of those dollars we are all holding and so if these assets start going at bargain basement prices, then we are all really in a jam.