I experienced a rather amusing moment, at my expense, with William Simon in 1977.
There isn't much that was news to me in that article. It's general knowledge there is a lot of sovereign wealth invested in US Treasury bonds. What is not known is the specific amount.
Saudi Arabia has come face-to-face with a crisis everyone knew was coming, except it came sooner rather than later.
I will now repost something I have posted on this forum before:
You want to hear a number that is mind boggling?
According to the CIA World Factbook, there are
1.656 trillion barrels of proved oil reserves.
That's not the mind boggling part. Hold on.
But first, I must specify what "proved oil reserves" means:
"
Proved reserves are those quantities of petroleum which, by analysis of geological and engineering data, can be estimated with a high degree of confidence to be commercially recoverable from a given date forward, from known reservoirs and under current economic conditions."
Okay. That's oil we know is there. It's money just sitting in the ground, waiting to be taken out and put in the bank.
Here's comes the mind blower.
The price of crude oil on January 31, 2014 was $102.10. The price of crude oil on January 31, 2016 was $29.78.
So, let's do the math and see how much wealth has gone up in smoke. Ready?
102.10 - 29.78 = 72.32.
So in the past two years, every proven reserve barrel of oil has lost $72.32 in value.
Multiply that by the 1.656 trillion barrels of proven reserves, and in the past two years $119,761,920,000,000 of wealth has vaporized.
$120 TRILLION!!!!
So what's the big deal, you may be wondering. It's not like the oil in the ground is actually someone's bank account and they have lost money.
Oh, but it actually is someone's bank account. You see, those people who own those reserves have gotten loans and issued high interest bonds, using those reserves as collateral.
What happens to a debtor when their collateral loses value? What do you think all those creditors holding those high interest bonds and the paper on all those loans are thinking as they ponder the fact the collateral backing all those bonds has lost $120 trillion in value?
What do you think the investors who bought tranches of derivatives build on all those loans and bonds are thinking?
Yeah.
Let the fun times begin.