Sovereign Wealth Funds as Domestic Investors of Last Resort During Crises

Usual definitions of Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) put emphasis on their foreign investments. But after September 2008, some Sovereign Wealth Funds refrained from foreign investments and turned to the support of their home economies. We show that these interventions of Sovereign Wealth Funds as domestic “investors of last resort” are far from marginal and that they are not a passing innovation of the last global crisis. We review first the cases of interventions of SWFs as “shareholders of last resort” and differentiate interventions targeted on banks, from more general interventions designed to support non financial firms. We then turn to the interventions of SWFs as “lenders of last resort” and insurance funds against major crises.