Tracking Sovereign Wealth Funds

Sadly, were he living today, bank robber Willie Sutton would have to rethink his characterization of banks as, "where the money is." In the last twelve months, sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) have rescued (or tried to rescue) UBS, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch.

Using the M&A-DEALS database on Westlaw you can track the activities of SWFs. To search for SWF deals use the "buyer description" field like so: BD("sovereign wealth fund"). A search run today generated 250 hits. The data in M&A-DEALS comes from Thomson Reuters' SDC Platinum product.

For more background on SWFs have a look at this report from Price Waterhouse Coopers and this one from The Council on Foreign Relations.