Breakingviews: Sovereign Wealth Funds Risk Index

Friday, January 25th, 2008

Jan. 25, 2008 - Today, we received this piece about Breakingviews.com’s new SWF Risk Index:

Breakingviews sovereign wealth fund risk index

By Una Galani AND Simon Nixon

To see the full index with detailed rankings, click on the link below

Sovereign Wealth Fund Index: Sovereign wealth funds were hardly talked about twelve months ago. Now they are one of the hottest topics in global financial markets. Over the last year, these state-owned entities have spent over $75bn snapping up stakes in some of the world’s biggest banks, taken big positions in stock exchanges on both sides of the Atlantic and even attempted a takeover of one of Britain’s leading supermarkets.

Such funds have existed for decades, but the shift in global economic power and the current weakness in western markets has given SWFs – forecast to grow assets fivefold to $13.4tr by 2017 – new influence and raised new fears about their motives. Critics such as President Sarkozy of France and some US politicians worry that SWFs tend to be secretive, target political as well as financial returns, and operate at the whim of governments not always sympathetic to western economic and political interests…

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