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Charles de Gaulle imperiously describes it as "a lien weighing heavily on our national patrimony." Britain's Prime Minister Harold Wilson calls it "industrial helotry." West Germany's Finance Minister Franz Josef Strauss uses the word Ausverkauf—meaning sellout. The U.S. Government has frowned on it as a plague on the balance of payments. No matter what it is called, the fact remains that one of the most significant developments of the post-World War II world is the great leap by U.S. corporations into overseas markets—whether by direct investment in plant and equipment or by acquisition of foreign companies. In making that leap, American companies have begun to reshape themselves into global organizations to which national boundaries—and such narrow definitions as domestic or foreign —mean little.
Last year American firms invested $10.2 billion, or about 14% of all their capital spending on plant and equipment, in ventures outside the U.S. This rising annual amount brought their total overseas ante to $64.8 billion, more than the gross national product of many a nation, and eight times the amount foreign businessmen have invested in the U.S. in the 191 years of the Republic. Americans now control 80% of Europe's computer business, 90% of the microcircuit industry, 40% of its automaking, and sizable shares of chemicals, farm machinery and oil. In Britain, U.S. companies own half of all modern industry, employ one of every 17 British workingmen, manufacture 10% of all British goods for home consumption or export. U.S. firms also squeeze out twice as much profit from invested capital as their British competitors. Of this, they ship $225 million a year home, reinvest the rest for the long term abroad.
All this has come about with astonishing rapidity. In 1945, with World War II over and international business reviving, U.S. companies had only a modest $8.4 billion invested around the world. By 1958, this had grown to $27.4 billion. With last year's increase, U.S. private investment abroad has octupled in 20 years. And the move abroad is undiminished, if only because the market is there. Explains Rubberman Raymond C. Firestone: "Sometime in 1968, the number of motor vehicles in use in other nations will outnumber those in the U.S. for the first time. We want to put tires on those vehicles."
Iron Mike's Domain. Few men understand the problems and profit of this kind of U.S. manifest destiny better than the short (5 ft. 8 in.), bald, square-jawed chairman and chief executive of the world's biggest oil company, Standard Oil of New Jersey.*He is 63-year-old Michael Lawrence Haider (rhymes with strider), and he views the world from a 29th-floor office in midtown Manhattan's RCA Building.
It is quite a view. In terms of globalization, few, if any, corporations can match the 85-year experience around the world of Jersey Standard, or its range of activities. With 52% of its vast assets abroad, Jersey is the world's biggest private overseas investor. Thus "Iron Mike" Haider, in the course of a day's work, may be involved in everything from a Middle East coup to whether Jersey should eventually construct a 1,000,000-ton supertanker, or what the President of the U.S. has on his mind.