With SWF Assets, Confusion Reigns

Recent research by RGE Monitor and The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) argues that sovereign wealth funds, while still large, aren’t nearly as vast as others might think.

(August 12) – Few would dispute that sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) control large amounts of the world’s institutional capital, but research by the CFR’s Brad Setser and RGE Monitor’s Rachel Ziemba suggests that these government pools of money are not nearly as large as many think.


According to the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute, total assets at oil- and gas-fueled funds amount to $2.2 trillion, while total worldwide sovereign fund wealth adds up to $3.6 trillion. Not so, say Ziemba and Setser, prominent industry analysts who have been following SWF assets for some time. According to them, the numbers are more like $1.2 trillion and $1.5 trillion.


Ziemba and Setser focus foremost on the Arabian Gulf funds to discern where others have gone wrong. “First, we continue to believe that the foreign assets of Abu Dhabi’s two main sovereign funds – The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), and the smaller Abu Dhabi Investment Council (which was created out of ADIA and manages some of ADIA’s former assets) – are far smaller than many continue to claim,” the authors state on RGE’s web site. Instead of the approximately $650 billion that the SWF Institute suggests, the authors estimate that the actual size is of the two funds is closer to $360 billion.

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The authors also focus on the opaque Chinese fund system. “The dividing line between China’s sovereign fund and China’s state banks isn’t totally clear,” they state. Because of this, they claim that many estimates include central bank-control assets, which in their view should not be included in any sovereign wealth totals.


The authors’ final focal point is stabilization funds, especially those in Russia and Saudi Arabia. “We would argue that stabilization funds that are managed by the central bank and counted as part of the country’s reserves should be considered reserve assets – and not included in the total for sovereign funds,” they say. “If it walks like a duck (is managed by the central bank) and quacks like a duck (is invested predominantly in traditional reserve assets), it is a duck.”


Despite their views that SWF totals are vastly overstated, the authors’ do claim that such funds have rebounded from their December 2008 lows. Oil funds, they suggest, have risen by $71 billion since the end of last year, while Asian funds are up $36 billion to a total of $370 billion. Total sovereign funds, they believe, are up $107 billion from their December low of $1.425 trillion.


To read more on Gulf sovereign wealth funds in ai5000, click here .



To contact the <em>aiCIO</em> editor of this story: Kristopher McDaniel at <a href='mailto:kmcdaniel@assetinternational.com'>kmcdaniel@assetinternational.com</a>

Sally Bridgeland

Bridgeland is Chief Executive of BP’s giant pension scheme. The willowy ex-consultant shared her thoughts with ai5000 in-house about management, hedge funds, and the demerits of pension buyouts.

 

Where did I start? I was at Hewitt for 20-plus years before coming to BP. As a consultant, I was a generalist; here, I am a relative specialist. The role of the trustee—a role I love—is a mix of understanding benefits, funding, and investment risks. Unlike the majority of British pension schemes, we mostly manage our funds internally. There is a certain magic to in-house management. There are two sides to our structure: operations and investments. As the CEO, I need to speak the language of both. The investment managers are deep, deep specialists. The biggest difference between internal and external investment management is the business model. Investment managers, by nature, need to be contrarian. To do this successfully, it is best that they have stability. It’s hard to have stability externally; internally, the hiring and firing process is much more evolutionary. If you look at external managers, the business model is about assets under management, and not losing clients. As with many pension funds, more important than performing well is simply not performing badly, and the business relationships are sticky, and usually the result of emotion supported by facts sought after the fact. So, we like the internal model. As the head of investment management, I have to make sure they aren’t making silly decisions based on overconfidence or depression. There has to be confidence—it’s a natural human emotion that evolved with us—but not too much. Ten percent of our investments are in private equity. We’re not expecting to need that money now. This is an area where pensions can and should profit. We use a mix of external and internal managers here; we are learning how they do it, and then we do it internally. We don’t invest in hedge funds as a policy; our sponsor can afford to take risks, but we would rather take equity risks than hedge fund risks—and we don’t want to pay the fees. There are bargains to be had, but hedge funds aren’t one of them. Yes, there are problems with defined benefit plans: the rules allowing vesting earlier, after even only a year or two; the scheme becoming a bargaining chip. The scale of the benefits went to such levels, but it wasn’t meant to be like that; that wasn’t the game—it was meant to be a long-service award. As a result, our biggest risk isn’t investment risk; it’s covenant risk, it’s whether BP can continue to support us. BP took a contribution holiday, yes. We’re playing a long game; it was the right decision. Our funding status is still positive. Not as positive as it was, but we’re still above water. Would we consider a pension buyout? Not now. We might in some circumstances, say, if we were taken over by a foreign company, but our employees wouldn’t like it—they expect their pension to come, in the end, from BP.



aiCIO Editorial Staff

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