Foreign Owned Corporations

Not long ago, a bank branch manager walked into the office of a competitor in Los Angeles and asked for a job. His bank had been bought by a Japanese bank, he explained, and the parent company in Tokyo would no longer allow unsecured loans of more than $10,000.

The Japanese leapfrogged the British to become by far the largest direct foreign investors in the United States in 1987, with almost $200 billion in assets, the Commerce Department said Tuesday. Foreign direct investment was concentrated in California, with $42 billion in gross property, plant and equipment; Texas, with $41 billion, and New York, with $23 billion, according to a study by the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis. Affiliate employment was concentrated in manufacturing and retail trade and was largest in California, with 324,200; New York, with 300,100, and Texas, with 207,600, the BEA said.

It was a sale that many in this blue-collar city thought they would never see: Health-tex, the venerable children's apparel maker, was closing its Gadsden plant. Everything was on the auction block--sewing machines, mannequins, time clocks, even the cavernous yellow brick building itself. An auctioneer's cry sent a symbolic shiver throughout a region that long considered itself immune to economic trends that have ravaged and reshaped other parts of the country.

A Hong Kong businessman helped the Republican Party get money it needed to take over Congress in 1994, and again before crucial elections in 1996. The bailout, reported in Time magazine, could draw congressional investigators' attention to Republicans, who have attacked the White House and Democratic National Committee for alleged foreign money connections. Ambrous Tung Young, who has served as the Asian agent for Western aviation companies seeking to sell planes in China and Taiwan, put up $2.

The entrance to Khailmohmad Safi's garage is blocked by about 200 sandbags, and a few feet away, behind 8-foot-high concrete barriers, several heavily armed men talk into their radios and peer out into the street. The setting looks like the gateway to a military base. Instead, it is a street in the middle of one of the capital's most affluent neighborhoods. The road contains the residential compound of the DynCorp security firm.

The Federal Trade Commission, ending a two-year controversy with a decision favored by labor and some business groups, said Monday that it will not tinker with requirements for the "Made in USA" label. The commission twice this year had proposed expanding the amount of foreign content that a product could contain and still use the label, but ran into a tidal wave of protest each time. In Southern California, garment groups were among those who were opposed to a revision, but U.S.

Six years ago, the president of Equatorial Guinea was invited to invest in a promising venture with one of the U.S. oil giants tapping his tiny nation's reserves. Mobil Oil Corp. offered the West African leader a stake in an oil trading business for $2,300, according to documents the company filed with a Senate subcommittee that were released last month. Now, the company says, that stake is valued at about $645,000. Mobil, now part of Exxon Mobil Corp.

Federal trustbusters seeking to crack down on foreign cartels that fix prices of consumer products lost a key battle Monday when a judge dismissed criminal charges against a Japanese firm accused of conspiring to hike the price of facsimile paper sold in North America.

Are disabled passengers who board foreign-flagged cruise ships at U.S. ports protected by American laws prohibiting discrimination and unfair treatment? The justices of the Supreme Court took up that question Monday, and sounded as divided as the lower courts have been. In 1990, Congress said people with disabilities were entitled to "the full and equal enjoyment of ... places of public accommodation."