Ensuring Kuwait's Future, One $213 Billion Sovereign Wealth Fund at a Time

Bader Al-Sa'ad, a 49-year-old Kuwaiti, is one of many managers who run government investment arms in the Middle East. Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Qatar combined control some $1.5 trillion in government reserves. At the Kuwait Investment Authority, where he manages his own $213 billion chunk, Al-Sa'ad may be busy studying the diversification of major university endowments in the US, but at the same time, he's drawing his money out of the US, on the basis that an economy with 2% isn't worth his time.

So goes the emergence of sovereign wealth funds, the massive capital reserves that governments around the world are now leveraging via the changing rules of international investing.

Henny Sender profiles Al-Sa'ad in today's Journal and reports a number of vital facts about the ways that this single fund is functioning in the progressive Gulf state.

In Kuwait, 10% of the nation's oil revenue is funneled directly into the investment authority, and as Al-Sa'ad puts it, his country doesn't have, other than oil, considerable long-term strategic advantages. (Say, something like cheap labor in China.) In turn, the fund he manages, and the others like it, are meant to sediment a foundation that will last long past the time when the wells run dry.

The Journal plays up Kuwait's taste for assets in Asia. Last year, Al-Sa'ad put $700 million into the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, and at the same time, he recently sold off 350 Park, a commercial Manhattan property. Where the shifting trend comes through most clearly:

Mr. Al-Sa'ad is cutting the portion of the portfolio invested in the US and Europe to less than 70% from about 90%. "Why invest in 2%-growth economies when you can invest in 8%-growth economies?" he asks.

The article omits outright what has been a chief concern in the rise of sovereign wealth funds, namely, their lack of transparency. As these funds across the world are expected to be worth $12 trillion by 2015, and will thus have immense power in swaying world markets without the protection of oversight or regulation, doesn't a pressing inquiry about propriety lay beyond Al-Sa'ad's trending toward Asian real-estate?