Everyone is talking about sovereign wealth funds. There are six countries whose governments are substantial international investors. Three are Middle Eastern ones – the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Norway and Singapore have large funds. Then there is China. Other sovereign funds are smaller than the bigger pension funds, and the total assets even of the big six are marginal relative to the scale of privately controlled investments.

But the political dimension of sovereign wealth raises passions absent, or less obvious, when the investor is Blackstone, Fidelity or Goldman Sachs. The suspicion and protest that greeted Kuwait’s involvement in BP two decades ago is today applied to its holding in Daimler and Abu Dhabi’s stakes in Citigroup and Sony. The idea that American ports and California’s oil might come under foreign control causes consternation in Congress.