The cover of the January 19, 2008, edition of The Economist showed three large tandem-rotor military helicopters, each hauling a pallet full of gold bars and emblazoned with the flags of China, Singapore and Kuwait.
Credit: The Economist
Above the fleet of helicopters, the headline announced the impending “invasion of the sovereign wealth funds.” This hyperbolic declaration was a reference to several sovereign wealth funds
(SWFs) from Asia and the oil-rich Arabian Gulf that had, in the week prior, pumped $69 billion into troubled Western financial institutions, some of which were among the world’s largest banks and investment managers.
At that time, the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the advent of the 2008 global financial crisis were still more than nine months away. The prevailing attitude of Western policymakers was still mostly averse to the notion of wide-scale market intervention, which some economists half-mockingly described as drops of “helicopter mo
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