Saudi Arabia Prepares for Post-Oil Era with $2 Trillon Public Investment Fund

There have been a number of readers here who have commented on the news story about Saudi Arabia launching a $2 trillion investment fund to help the country prepare for a post-oil era. I thought I’d start a new thread on the subject.

Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told John Mickelthwait of Bloomberg News in a 5-hour interview that the country was preparing an investment fund that would help to transform the state-owned Aramco oil company into an ‘industrial conglomerate’. Shares in the fund would be publicly traded with an IPO planned as early as next year. The fund will become the largest sovereign wealth investment fund on earth with the capability of buying stakes in companies worldwide. The plan is to diversify into other fields and use the return on investments to fund government operations.

The reason for this transformation of Aramco is based on collapse of oil revenues, upon which Saudi Arabia has relied for so many decades. The country is undergoing a vast belt-tightening process with generous subsidies for gasoline and electricity being cut and wasteful spending being cut out the state budgets.

Mickelthwait says the crown prince has an obsession on moving the Saudi economy away from oil to something new. When asked about the level of desperation in the company regarding the collapse of oil wealth, Mickelthwait said the Saudis want to expand their role in the energy markets by becoming the world’s biggest refiner of oil and become a huge industrial energy company — as well as expanding into other fields such as mining and petrochemicals.

Are the Saudis aware of the possible implications of LENR hitting the marketplace? There’s nothing that has been reported publicly about this, so we can’t say for certain. We do know that Industrial Heat has the license to sell and possibly manufacture E-Cats in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates — so it would not be surprising at all if they had already started laying the groundwork for commercialization of LENR there.

The article and interview with the author can be read at Bloomberg News here: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-01/saudi-arabia-plans-2-trillion-megafund-to-dwarf-all-its-rivals