It's a pure exageration. Public Investment Fund AUM are circa 600bn, which is a lot, but it's essentially equivalent to a big insurance company in Europe, and

It's a pure exageration. Public Investment Fund AUM are circa 600bn, which is a lot, but it's essentially equivalent to a big insurance company in Europe, and there are about half a dozen of them, while the largest insurance companies in the U.S. have about 1.5x that assets under management. Not even bringing European, American, Japanese and Chinese banks into the equation because their AUM make the PIF look small in comparison. The Saudis buy trophy assets, that's what prompt superficial observers to claim they are buying the world, while the big asset owners in the West invest mostly in Bonds and if they have any ownership in trophy assets is residual and the ownership is not direct but via the dozens private equity funds and private equity real estate funds that they hire to manage the 5-10% that they decide to allocate to non-bonds investments. Banks on the other hand, their investments are invisible because it's never ownership, it's loans, and loans don't make the news ever, not even big ones make it to the financial press. The trophy asset purchase program is exactly aimed at giving people the sense that the KSA is crushing it and 'taking over the world', when in reality they are a relatively small country where the wealth per capita is extremely high but the total wealth (including sovreign wealth) pales compared to the U.S. Europe, China, Japan etc.