Chinese investors are buying U.S. assets like the Japanese did in the 1980s

It’s the Asian buying-spree of the 1980s all over again!

In the first quarter of this year, Chinese investors have completed around $41 billion worth of United States deals, which is close to double the amount for all of 2015. That’s an astounding amount.

What’s even more interesting is that many of these mergers and acquisitions are being funded by an astronomical amount of debt.

This isn’t anything necessarily new. Throughout the 1980s, Japanese investors acquired a lot of U.S. assets, and this helped fuel the Japanese stock bubble. Since then, however, the country has been in a zombie-like state, otherwise known as the lost decade of the 1990s.

So, just what are the Chinese buying in the U.S.? According to Bloomberg News, Chinese investors are mostly buying these seven things:

– Luxury hotels
– Coffee machine, dishwasher and refrigerator makers
– Crane companies
– Hollywood motion picture producers
– Software distributors
– Mobile applications
– Stock exchanges

Not only do the Japanese and Chinese own an immense amount of U.S. debt, they’re soon going to own many U.S. assets.