The amount of money invested by Chinese companies overseas dropped for the first time since the financial crisis, according to a new report by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). The Washington-based research and policy group ascribed the fall to declining Chinese interest in the capital-intensive energy and mining sectors. “It is a useful reminder that China is not buying the world,” wrote Derek Scissors, the report’s author and an AEI scholar. However, the apparent slowdown in transaction flow could be reversed by “a single large deal”. For the first half of this year, outbound investment totaled USD39.2 billion, according to the AEI. This compared to USD86.3 billion reported for the whole of 2013, suggesting a 9% annualized decline. Using a different methodology, China’s Ministry of Commerce reported USD40.6 billion in 2014 first-half deals and USD90.2 billion in 2013 transactions. The annualized percentage drop is almost the same. “While China’s USD4 trillion pile of foreign reserves, with perhaps USD800 billion more at state banks, suggests an unstoppable tide, investment cannot occur without opportunities in foreign markets. And the availability of these opportunities ebbs and flows,” wrote Scissors. The AEI’s China Global Investment Tracker recorded over USD500 billion in Chinese overseas deals since 2005. U.S. firms invested USD2.2 trillion in foreign markets during the same period.