Word: sama
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...religious sentiment swept their land. It was the start of Ramadan, the high holy month of Islamic fasting. But Ramadan or not, it was also pretty much business as usual in one imposing Riyadh office building. Inside the high-rise tower that houses the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA), computers kept humming and clerks kept counting as petrodollars continued to cascade into the desert kingdom's coffers at a rate of $320 million...
Guarding and investing much of the $117 billion or so that Saudi Arabia is now receiving yearly from oil exports is the responsibility of SAMA, and the money from oil knows no religion. In the past eight years, the kingdom's reserves of surplus petro earnings have swelled more than twenty fold, to at least $100 billion. As a result, SAMA, the country's central bank, has loomed as one of the most powerful and potentially threatening players in all of international finance. If it chose to do so, SAMA could buy scores of large American corporations...
...fact, bankers familiar with SAMA'S investments state flatly that the agency has little if anything to hide; the world's richest investor is also its most conservative. While other OPEC nations like Kuwait have a fondness for foreign land deals and high-stakes stock market plays, SAMA restricts itself to buying less than 5% of a company's stock. Explains a London banker who deals closely with SAMA: "The Saudis have an absolute terror of American politicians standing on the floor of the Senate and accusing them of buying up America...
Instead of stocks and real estate, SAMA'S favorite investments are super-safe U.S. Treasury bills and notes, of which the bank now holds about $30 billion. Much of the rest of the agency's surplus is in short-term deposits at some 80 different blue-ribbon Western banks...
Still more is lent out in so-called private corporate placements. These loans -SAMA now has as much as $15 billion outstanding-are unpublicized transactions in which major Western corporations raise money by borrowing directly from SAMA. Among the private placements on SAMA's books: $650 million for AT&T, $300 million for IBM and $200 million for U.S. Steel...