Bush: It's our money to begin with

U.S. President Bush gave a talk yesterday before the Economics Club of New York. Here's one portion of what he had to say:

A confident nation accepts capital from overseas. We can protect our people against investments that jeopardize our national security, but it makes no sense to deny capital, including sovereign wealth funds, from access to the U.S. markets. It's our money to begin with. (Laughter.) It seems like we ought to let it back. (Applause.)

It's a pretty funny line.

Yesterday was also the release date of Nothing to Fear but Fearmongers Themselves: A Look at the Sovereign Wealth Fund Debate by Daniel J. Ikenson, associate director for the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. One paragraph:

Most anxiety about SWFs is attributable to their rapid increase in number and size. At nearly $3 trillion (the upper end of current estimates), SWFs are more than twice as large as all of the world’s hedge funds combined. But $3 trillion constitutes a tiny sliver of the $190 trillion stock of global financial assets or the $62 trillion managed by private institutional investors.14 Even with SWF assets projected to quadruple by 2015, global asset values are projected to grow as well, such that the percentages owned by SWFs should not change much. It is highly improbable that the investment decisions of SWFs will “move” U.S. markets.