Expanding the global B-ark personnel manifest is still not the worst thing a trillion dollars in the hands of that theocratic royal family could achieve.
Far, far from the best, but not the worst.
Also the "free market"[1] gave KSA all that money willingly in exchange for oil (as opposed to, say, sorting out alternating energy technologies 30 years ago).
[1]: Well, maybe with a generous geopolitical subsidy delivered by Raytheon and US Marines.
Again, it caused two decades of political upheaval in South America, multiple military dictatorships, hyper-inflation, economic chaos, etc. (this was all mediated by US banks btw, who were the ones doing the lending...but the reason they were in that position is because ME countries insisted on depositing all their money with US banks).
Right, but the reason the "free market" gave that money was because of the geological properties of KSA, not their ability to invest capital wisely. The failure to realise that this is a path to nowhere is the fault of our politicians however.
For comparison, if I am raising capital for a hedge fund and I start talking about the geological properties of the earth under my house then I will carted out. But that logic is how KSA are one of the largest investors in the world...it is going about as well as you might imagine (the same is true for Taiwan, Japan, Germany in more subtle ways...they have created systems that expropriate wealth from consumers for investors, and those investors essentially spend a huge amount of time setting that money on fire...the only country that has got out of this is Sweden, which decided to give substantially all their material wealth to one family, the Wallenbergs, who turned out to be the some of the best investors globally...but that is a rare example of arbitrary wealth allocation ending well).
This is also a large part of why the US is as powerful as it is. Through a quirk of history and geography, it found itself with enormous amounts of highly productive land, crammed with resources and thousands of miles and oceans away from conflicts which decimated others.
For all the high-minded aspirations of the early Americans, their grand experiment would not have worked so well if they'd annexed Greenland.
> raising capital for a hedge fund and I start talking about the geological properties of the earth under my house then I will carted out.
Certainly they'd be wondering why you're faffing about with a hedge fund when you could be mining that.
Far, far from the best, but not the worst.
Also the "free market"[1] gave KSA all that money willingly in exchange for oil (as opposed to, say, sorting out alternating energy technologies 30 years ago).
[1]: Well, maybe with a generous geopolitical subsidy delivered by Raytheon and US Marines.