Sovereign Funds

It's kind of funny how just a year or two ago, everybody was looking in awe at the various Sovereign Investment Funds, especially Singapore's Temasek and GIC, but also Norway, Abu Dhabi and whatnot. At the same time, people were deriding the Chinese for being naive about their foreign investment strategy, dabbling in all sorts of deals without following through (some minor exceptions notwithstanding), and keeping so much cash in low-yield US treasuries.

Who's laughing now, I wonder:

China's holdings of US government bonds have held up just fine, whereas Singapore has been clobbered by putting its financial firepower into various Western financial institutions, nearly all of which have been more or less wiped out by the crisis.