Word: surplus
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Industrialized nations have complained loudly about the damaging effects of the deluge of Japanese exports, but the carping so far has not done much good. Indeed, last week private research institutes in Tokyo predicted that after two years of deficits, Japan will have a substantial surplus in foreign trade and services by the end of the fiscal year...
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...
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...
...safety-first investments, have stirred resentment among the Saudis' poorer neighbors. A leading Lebanese newspaper, As Safir, charged last month that Saudi Arabia was "a hostage of the West" held by "chains of gold." Arab nationalist groups throughout the Middle East argue that more of the Saudi surplus should be invested in the Third World...
What the tiny (pop. 1.4 million) Persian Gulf emirate of Kuwait loses in size to Saudi Arabia, it more than makes up for in aggressive money management. In contrast to the Saudis, with their conservative investment policies, the Kuwaitis have long used their surplus oil revenues, which now exceed an estimated $65 billion, to wheel and deal in real estate and in the stocks and bonds of blue-chip Western companies...