Bankruptcy

Foreign Governments Continue to Buy/Bail-out US Mega Banks

By J. Michael McBride

The latest in the trend for foreign governments to use their "sovereign funds" to buy stakes in US Banks is Kuwait which just invested 3 billion more in Citi Bank during January. Likewise, it invested 2 billion in Merrill Lynch.

Here is a link to one article on this subject:
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080624/kuwait_fund_us_banks.html?.v=1

Here is a favorable quote from a longer, more in depth article on the general subject of sovereign funds:

"One hyperventilating observer of these developments even bemoaned the onset of a “sharecropper economy” in the United States.

In truth, such funds are nothing for Americans or Europeans to fear. If anyone should worry about them, it’s the people whose governments are amassing them. That’s because governments tend to be terrible at managing money that is best left in the hands of private citizens. And locking away billions of dollars in wealth can have pernicious economic side effects. Maybe that’s why sovereign wealth funds are popular with dictators and semi-authoritarian regimes, which don’t have to answer for the consequences when they make poor economic gambles.

Sovereign wealth funds are nothing new, but they are growing larger. They emerged in the 1970s in oil-producing emirates, such as Kuwait and Abu Dhabi, as a way to accumulate current account and budget surpluses during the oil boom. Now, Abu Dhabi boasts the largest fund, sized at $600-700 billion, and other countries have followed its lead.

Norway established a fund for its excess oil incomes in 1990. Singapore has accumulated two large funds that, unusually, are not based on oil income. And more recently, China and Russia have instituted large sovereign wealth funds of their own. Today, such funds hold as much as $2.5 trillion in assets, according to Ted Truman, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Some economists forecast they will grow to $12 trillion by 2015, an amount that roughly corresponds to the size of the entire U.S. economy.

The motives of the funds vary, and they don’t always make sense. Consider Abu Dhabi and Kuwait, which wanted to save their oil endowment for future generations, an admirable goal. But today these two bureaucratized emirates look like poor cousins in comparison with freewheeling Dubai, which has much less oil. Because the rulers of Abu Dhabi and Kuwait centralized their nations’ wealth in the hands of the state, their state sectors stifled their economies. Abu Dhabi’s fund may be impressive, but the entrepreneurial emir of Dubai has done a far better job of putting sustainable wealth in the hands of his citizens."

And here is the link to that article:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4056

Michael

Full post as published by Texas Lawyer Blog on June 26, 2008 (boomark / email).