Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds:

"There is, and we actually, periodically see this happen. And it's really stemming from two things. First of all, as most people know, we've been running huge trade deficits in our country, meaning that we're buying more products from overseas than we're selling to those countries. And what this does is put U.S. dollars in the hands of those foreign producers, and those foreign producers have to ultimately use those dollars to buy something in the U.S. And so what they're coming back and doing is they're buying those assets you mentioned and companies and land and buildings and so forth and other kinds of investments. So that's one factor. The other factor is that the U.S. dollar, of course, relative to foreign currencies has been low. So actually U.S. assets in terms of their price have looked relatively cheap to foreign buyers. So the bottom line here is that foreign buyers have the dollars to buy U.S. assets, and the U.S. assets look very reasonable in terms of price. And that's the reason we're seeing this boom in foreign buying here in the U.S. Now, you might say, to what extent is this going on? Well, still, if you look at all the assets, all the investments in the U.S. economy, and you ask what part of those is owned by foreign people, it's about 15 percent."