It’s becoming increasingly clear that foreign capital will not be a major factor in the bailout of the financial sector. A lot of the equity purchases made recently by sovereign wealth funds haven’t exactly panned out, after all, and as Badr al-Saad, managing director of the Kuwait Investment Authority, succinctly put it:
We are not responsible for saving foreign banks. This is the duty of the central banks in these countries.
Meanwhile, the calls for foreign participation is ironic, given all the anguish over sovereign wealth funds invading the American financial sector earlier this year. But I suppose the biggest problem with sovereign wealth funds remains the fact that they are sovereign.