patrick.net

DS,

When you say "and the bin Ladens who were involved in Carlyle and have a trillion dollars in the US stock market and were about to get the green light to run US ports by Bush, hmm…" it's hard to read it as something other than you surmising that the Bin Ladens have a trillion dollars in the US stock market. I'm not sure you can conflate the Bin Ladens directly with the Sauds. The Bin Ladens may have become extremely wealthy and influential with Saudi patrons, but they're not the rulers of Saudi Arabia.

I'm not familiar with Middleeastern finance but I would be interested to find out more, so please do post your source.

My general sense of the situation is that although the Sauds control the oil revenue, they plow much of the money back in charities and administrative budgets and shopping trips to UAE and such. Although they control the finances of the country, they have a big population (more than half of whom can't work and can't even drive to the grocery store by themselves) to support and no other industry but oil revenues. So I think $1 trillion invested in the US sounds a wee bit on the high side, especially when it makes sense for them to invest much of their surplus in the Middleeast or in Europe, rather than in the more distant and hostile US.

yeah, it's a poor and hastily written sentence -- my apologies...

more research actually suggests it's only half a trillion in the US, or $420 billion, and a total of about $760 billion, or 3/4 of a trillion, in the US and Europe combined.

(According to the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy, a pro-Saudi think tank which tries to emphasize the importance of Saudi money to the United States -- Tanya C. Hsu , “The United States Must Not Neglect Saudi Arabian Investment” Sept. 23, 2003.)

so only half a trillion. sorry.

one of the reasons many ordinary Saudis are so pissed off with things is that their real wages have been chopped by 2/3 since the 1980s.

note that 60% of overseas investment by saudi arabia is in the US, tho...

Hmm, I can't comment on the amount, though I guess the number could go either ways.

"one of the reasons many ordinary Saudis are so pissed off with things is that their real wages have been chopped by 2/3 since the 1980s."

For some reason, I thought it was much worse than that. My impression was that Saudi Arabia was once on par per capita with the US, but is now less than 1/2 of that. Also, given that need to desalinate their water and don't let their women drive, the cost of living would be a lot higher. Since their males are generally not trained in the sciences of making new stuff, their women can't even do anything outside of the home, and they have a huge population boom -- I will agree with you that the Sauds have gotten themselves into quite a situation.