Pay the lobbyists to beat double standards

So far, the reaction among politicians and the public in the United States on the possible acquisition of the New York Stock Exchange by Deutsche Boerse AG and Nasdaq by the London Stock Exchange has been relatively muted. There has been less panic, protest or paranoia than expected.

What a different story it would have been if the buyers were the Shanghai Stock Exchange or another Chinese firm. You can be sure there would have been a furious outcry and immediate objections from lawmakers on Capitol Hill and that the media would have been analyzing the political, instead of the business, implications of the deals and that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), an inter-governmental agency that reviews foreign investments for national security risks, would certainly have rejected the acquisition of these US icons by Chinese companies because of "national security concerns".

That kind of discrimination is exactly what Huawei Technologies and several Chinese companies have experienced in the US in the past few years.