This past month saw an unprecedented infusion of Asian capital into the West's leading financial institutions. Sovereign wealth funds from China, Singapore and Abu Dhabi have spent tens of billions of dollars acquiring shares of distressed U.S. and Swiss blue chip finance companies including Morgan Stanley, UBS, Citigroup, and Merrill Lynch. With a headline "Great Wall Street of China," the Wall Street Journal reports that this is the first time that Chinese companies and the government bought more overseas than foreign buyers have invested in China."

With shrinking credit, massive write-offs and talk of a recession, how can American companies make themselves look more attractive to Asian buyers? Can foreign ownership spur transformation and further globalization in the world's largest companies?