Interesting piece in today’s Investor’s Business Daily on German buyouts of U.S. companies (see chart below).   Money quotes:

In total, there has been $64.5 billion worth of German acquisitions of U.S. targets in 2014, according to Thomson Reuters. That beats any full year in the 20 years that Thomson has tracked.

“Three of the four largest-ever German acquisitions in the United States have taken place this year, the largest-ever being Daimler-Benz’s acquisition of Chrysler back in 1998,” said Richard Peterson, senior director at S&P Capital IQ.

What’s driving the trend? Some of the most venerable German giants have been reorganizing and refocusing their businesses, reflected in the fact that they’ve been selling as well as buying. Just last week Bayer announced that it’s spinning off its polymer business into a separate company. Last month, Siemens agreed to sell its health care IT business to Cerner^CERN for $1.3 billion.

There are also industry-specific reasons why they chose their targets. Big pharma’s acquisition strategy has been guided for the last few years by the idea that a product category isn’t worth being in unless you’re No. 1 or No. 2, which the Bayer and Merck buyouts help accomplish. SAP’s buyout expanded the company further into the hot cloud-computing space, while Dresser-Rand brings Siemens a play on the shale-oil boom.

…“One factor that might connect the various deals (but I would not overstretch this point) is that emerging market growth has slowed down a little and the political risk in these markets receives more attention again,” Christian Stadler, associate professor at the Warwick Business School in Coventry, U.K., told IBD in an email. “This means that developed markets are gaining more interest again. Now once you look at developed markets, you notice that the U.S. is doing better than Europe and Japan.”

S&P’s Peterson cited signs that the European economy is slowing, which encourages companies to buy their way to growth. Lack of revenue gains is a unifying theme of all these buyers: the top performer among them is SAP, whose sales grew a whopping 8% year-over-year last quarter.

Peterson also suggested that the stronger dollar might be putting the German buyers in more of a hurry to close the deals before their targets get too pricey.

(click here if chart is not observable)