In the Globe & Mail Economy Lab column, Stephen Gordon points out the monotonous message we get from our financial news sources every time a foreign company buys a Canadian firm:
Here is a headline that will never, ever run over a foreign takeover story: “Foreign buyers taken to cleaners by savvy Canadian investors.”
The reason you will never see that sort of a headline is that all stories in which foreigners buy Canadian-owned assets are based on the assumption that foreign investors are — yet again! — snapping up Canadian-owned assets on the cheap, and why oh why won’t Ottawa intervene and put a stop to it? The notion that Canadian investors are fully capable of assessing the value of their holdings and that they might earn a tidy profit in selling them never seems to make an appearance in these accounts.
