Chapter 5: The Outsourced Highway - Wealth Funds Summary and Analysis

Sovereign wealth funds or SWFs are huge pools of state-owned money looking for investment opportunities. They are common in the Middle East, especially among large oil-producing countries. Needless to say, they are not regulated and are were not created to benefit the populace. A young friend of Matt's worked for one of these SWFs and was astonished to learn that the Pennsylvania Turnpike, all the parking meters in Chicago and Los Angeles, and a port in Virginia, to name just a few, were all on the block. America is for sale. Thanks to Goldman-Sachs and other investment banks who drove up the price of oil through the commodities speculation market, billions and billions of our dollars greatly enriched these foreign wealth funds.

In 1973, President Nixon decided to rearm the...