China Investment Corporation, China’s $300 billion sovereign-wealth fund (SWF), is preparing to buy distressed U.S. real estate assets.

It will do so using the U.S. Treasury Department’s Public-Private Investment Program (PPIP) to fund the investments, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, several Chinese officials warned that Wall Street isn’t taking the recession seriously, and that much more pain is in store for U.S. investors in the near term.

The PPIP program, which limits investments by any single investor to no more than 9.9 percent of each fund, is designed to help U.S. banks get rid of toxic mortgage assets by financing investors’ purchases of such securities.

CIC officials reportedly have held talks with U.S. private-equity fund managers, including BlackRock, Invesco, and Lone Star Funds, about buying securities backed by office buildings, hotels, strip malls and other commercial property, and about buying ownership interests in buildings as well.

Though CIC spent only $4.8 billion in global financial markets last year, it invested that much in a single month recently, CIC Chairman Lou Jiwei said last month.

He said that if future returns are good enough, it might ask the government to let it invest more of China’s $2.132 trillion foreign-exchange reserves.

CIC recently invested in a real-estate trust in Australia and in an owner and developer of office towers and retail stores in London.

The SWF also is considering investing in Hollywood production firms, the Times of London reports.

The move could give Beijing a direct stake in a variety of foreign media content “from South Korean television dramas and Japanese game shows to Hollywood blockbusters.”

The Chinese onslaught against the United States over economic issues continues, with Bank of China Vice President Zhu Min criticizing Wall Street for complacency in the wake of the financial crisis.

Bank of China is the country’s third largest bank.

Tags: China, economic, financial crisis, real estate, USA

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 10th, 2009 at 7:53 pm and is filed under Chinese Finance, Global Financial, Global Recession, US Finance, World Financial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.