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Notes -
Can you explain why is it beneficial to a country for foreigners to buy up their companies? Also I understand investing when you give the company money either for a loan or to buy their shares directly, but how is "after-market" public trading of stocks with other owners "investing" (in the sense of something beneficial to the country/company)?
(I'm asking as an ignoramus I'm not making a point.)
It depends on the price and what the sellers do with the money.
Perhaps the local capitalists have inside knowledge that bad times are coming and manage to sell at a high price before that knowledge spreads abroad. This is a leading indicator of things going wrong.
Or perhaps local capitalists have inside knowledge of better opportunities in Mexico. How will they raise capital? They can sell mature companies that they have built up earlier and invest in new companies with better growth prospects. This is a leading indicator of things going right and directly beneficial to Mexico.
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We probably do have excess trading versus what would be efficient for the economy. People like the game.
But a person doing direct investing in something producing cash flows for 50-100 years probably doesn’t actually want to be invested in that thing for 50-100 years.
I’ve always like the idea that public companies are like a report card for companies. Having to constantly convince people to own your stock makes companies perform better. How many people learn calculus because they opened a book versus they had a deadline to take a test? And then public markets do provide a means of changing management if the assets get cheap but the company isn’t making appropriate profits.
Sure, but having the owners and managers be the same people also greatly increases the incentives for the managers to do a good job. Private owners have much more information about the company and a much more direct way of effecting change. The private owners can always just sell the company if they think they can't do a good job of managing it or picking managers.
The main advantage publicly owned companies have isn't better management, it's just the ability to raise capital. Something that can matter a lot in capital intensive industries with only a few large companies.
Agree it’s primary about raising larger amounts of capital. The system does have means to incentivize management in public companies so trading in stocks does still have a purpose.
For larger companies you could actually have a debate on whether the management incentives are better being private or public. I would probably start with something like for more complex orgs the wisdom of crowds is smarter than one owner etc. Price signals from markets interpret information faster than a small group of owners.
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A couple of reasons that countries might want to let foreigners own stocks:
IPOs (Initial Public Offerings). These allow companies to raise money to invest. Or, more likely, the possibility of an IPO gives early investors a reason to invest, knowing they can cash out later.
Raising money via equity sales. Companies frequently sell shares to raise money or to pay employees with stock grants. If foreigners can invest, then stock prices will be higher, and they can raise more.
The failure mode for a lot of countries (like China) is that they want it both ways. They want the investor money, but then they don't want to actually pay the investors when profits happen. Then all the investor money dries up. Take a look at the price of top Chinese companies like $BABA. They are in the toilet.
But this happens in a lot of countries, even developed ones. Governments will change the rules when anyone starts making money. To invert the saying, many governments want to privatize losses but socialize profits. Obviously there is not a lot of sympathy for the foreign investor class.
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