Temasek Sees a Black Cloud Over B of A

FT Alphaville has a story about how Temasek, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, reacted to becoming an accidental investor in B of A. Its shares of Merrill Lynch were exchanged for B of A shares and after the merger Temasek owned 3% of B of A. The fund is pessimistic enough about B of A's prospects that they sold their shares and took a three-billion-dollar loss.

Sovereign Wealth Flight

Reuters reports that sovereign wealth funds, smarting from huge paper losses in the financial sector, are steering clear of buying stock in US companies. You just can't please some people.

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.