Word: oil
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...recent months. Huge, government-controlled investment pools from Abu Dhabi to China have helped to rescue Wall Street banks left short by the credit crisis - and still managed to leave Western governments feeling spooked. Their worry: the funds - swollen with foreign-currency reserves or billions in profits from oil and gas - might be hiding dark political motives behind fuzzy financial aims...
...lacking in clout. With assets of $382 billion at the end of March, it's the world's second-largest sovereign wealth fund, trailing only the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, which weighs in at about $875 billion. Norway's fund, flush with money from the nation's oil and gas, has stakes in 7,000 firms - from Google to Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Post to PetroChina. Astonishingly, the fund now owns about 1% of the entire European stock market, and close to 0.5% globally...
...pressure firms in a sector like Brazilian mining, in which exploitation of child labor persists. Nor will the environmentally unfriendly origins of the fund's cash prevent it from pressing for better ecological standards. Last year, for instance, the fund voted in favor of a shareholder push for U.S. oil major ExxonMobil to adopt emission-reduction goals. Hardly the actions of a rapacious villain...
...Iranians haven't been shy about making clear what's at stake. If the U.S. or Israel so much as drops a bomb on one of its reactors or its military training camps, Iran will shut down Gulf oil exports by launching a barrage of Chinese Silkworm missiles on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz and Arab oil facilities. In the worst case scenario, seventeen million barrels of oil would come off world markets...
...oil speculator told me that oil would hit $200 a barrel within minutes. But Iran's official news agency, Fars, puts it at $300 a barrel. I asked him if Iran is right, what does that mean...