Map of the territory and area covered by present-day Saudi Arabia. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment. Before 1920. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This is an important article from the BBC, citing that the Saudi cabinet has approved plans to try to move the country away from its dependency on oil profits, including creating a giant sovereign wealth fund.
Source: Saudi Arabia agrees plans to move away from oil profits – BBC News
Watch out for snake oil salesmen rushing to get to Saudi Arabia. I wonder if Saudi Arabia will use the amazingly successful Norwegian sovereign wealth fund as a benchmark?
Thoughts?
Dr Alf's Blog 
As Dr Alf and the smart money probably know already, the new selected “gold” for the present is Lithium which will go into the next generation of electric car batteries and the replacements for “rare earths” which are essential for mobile phones.
Goldman Sachs and its clients are already into Lithium and probably the Chinese firms which are mining it in Afghanistan, like China Metallurgical Corporation, and the businesses in China turning the material into batteries which will then go into German engineered limousines and luxury Japanese and Korean cars, SUV’s and their American equivalents.
Saudi Arabia has global ambitions and is building a constituency for itself by sponsoring the building of mosques and madrassas in places as far afield as Sri Lanka.
A lot of its Sovereign wealth fund will be invested in London, some in Cambridge where there are many exciting new developments in software, biotechnology, security/military software, biotechnology and a fair bit in America both in Silicon Valley and Boston where MIT is based.
They may model their investment portfolio differently to Kuwait’s Investment Fund which from memory, invests in things like brewing and leisure(Autobar), hotels and property on a “buy to leave” basis but it is likely to be different from the approach taken by Norway or Singapore’s Temasek.