1. 资源名称：Sovereign Wealth Funds: State Investments on the Rise

2. 作者：Deutsche Bank

3. 资源类别：研究报告

4. 资源大小、格式、页数：474kB   .pdf    20 pages

Sept 10, 2007

by Deutsche Bank Research

20 pages

Introduction

A global industry of state-owned funds almost twice the size of the
hedge-fund segment, with discretionary asset management
strategies and virtually no transparency vis-à-vis the outside world?
This scenario has attracted increasing attention by policymakers,
market participants and commentators in the past months. Policy
action has been announced, working groups formed and comments
disseminated from various sides in reaction to an industry which is
increasingly perceived as a potential source of challenges to the
global financial system.

Yet, so-called sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) have been around for
many decades, but have largely gone unnoticed so far. What is
different these days are the scale of the SWF business and the
perception of the potential influence these funds may have as
investors at a global scale, in conjunction with the emergence of
new players, mainly in emerging markets. Public attention has, in
addition, been raised by concerns over a potential sale of strategic
assets, a transfer of vital industrial knowledge and expertise, or
issues of public security.

All this taken together, this appears to turn the world upside down –
a paradigmatic change from a world in which private investors from
wealthy industrialised countries used to invest around the globe to
one in which emerging market governments become major shareholders
in Western companies. An allegedly new twist in the
globalisation story – in extremis feared by some to herald the sellout
of important strategic assets in the Western industrialised world.
To be sure, these concerns bear little relation with today’s reality.
This article1 looks into the largely unknown world of sovereign
wealth funds and puts them into perspective with global financial
markets, towards an assessment of their current and future
importance, and discusses the policy questions at hand.

It will be argued that, in the first place, SWFs are welcome investors
bringing important injections of liquidity to a broad range of asset
classes. Although not nearly as large as other, traditional institutional
investors such as investment and pension funds or insurance
companies, SWFs have already trespassed the threshold to
systemic significance in financial markets. This, as well as political
fears about the potential implications for single companies and
economies at large of foreign state investments have provoked
serious questions about the need for regulating the SWF industry.
We propose that any steps in that direction should be wellconsidered,
well-coordinated, and fundamentally based on the
principle of free market access.

[此贴子已经被作者于2007-12-10 12:55:21编辑过]