I was checking out the commentary for Die Hard the other day and they noted the film’s paranoia of Japanese ownership of American properties. It said that the fear of the Japanese was curious, since in truth out of all the foreign nationalities, the Dutch owned more U.S. property than anyone. Of course, they did not give a cite or elaborate.
Is this true, at least in some way?
I don’t have a cite for you but that was considered a fun fact during the 1990’s when it was feared that the Japanese were buying up America.
Unilever and Shell Oil are two Dutch corporations which own substantial assets in the United States.
I was stationed at a small Marine base in Albany, Ga for a couple of years. Well, across from the base there was a huge farm that seemed to go for miles. It was/is rumored that the Dutch owned that also.
A lot of it goes back to Colonial days, which the Dutch had a piece of the pie, but mostly in the Northeast. A lot has changed since and I believe they own some companies, as pointed out by Little Nemo in the previous posting. I would assume they own as much as other countries own in America.
This is G.Q., which should be reserved for solid information. However, I haven’t got that handy and the previous posters have only given guesses. Here is what I remember (but you should check it).
As I remember it, it wasn’t normal commercial companies but pension funds that had vast investments in U.S. property (buildings and ground). As it was explained, the Dutch have very solid pension schemes which leads to them having disproportionate amounts of money that must be invested in a relatively safe manner. I’m not sure whether all this is still the case; pension funds seem to have been burnt quite badly with the deflation of the stock markets.