To be fair, the Saudis have so much money it's hard to place, and therefore have to accept riskier terms. So maybe this is realistically the best they could do. And so Softbank can get away with better terms.

I've never understood that argument. Can't they just sink more money into the stock market?

Sinking more money in the stock market is the same as getting a worse deal or concession in any fund.

Stocks are already bought up to levels that don't make a meaningful theoretical return if the individual companies started returning capital via dividends.

Bonds are in the same situation, they have been bought up beyond sane levels (theoretical return based on coupon and yield curve) pushing their yield to lower rates than risk and inflation would warrant. Basically, with bonds you have to accept that some issuers will go bankrupt and you get a 100% loss on that portion of the portfolio, therefore the whole portfolio of bonds has to account for that risk and it can't right now, if you keep buying more of them at higher prices

Getting out of the public markets you go into the private equity markets. There are plenty of investments to fund which nobody else is funding due to the way the deal looks or the way the team looks. You go further out on the risk curve, and also accomplish the goal of keeping money flowing in the economy.

This is what the central banks wanted to happen: assets prices and yields of everything passive is so unattractive that people are forced to make their capital more productive in the economy. Sure they didn't expect people to plow into crypto, but risk is risk and yield is yield.

It is more likely that Softbank functions as an economic stimulus backed by the Bank of Japan's economic policy decisions.

Supply and Demand. More demand is better terms for stock sellers, i.e. companies. And their investing would probably completely skew the market. So it's hard. Investing directly might put them at risk of some kind of oversight as well.

And they already have a lot tied up in those kinds of investments anyhow. They own a lot of real estate around the world as well.

It's hard to find places to park that amount of money esp. if there are political considerations. Nobody is worried about taking money from the Norwegians ...

But there's more than one stock market - there are so many around the world, surely them buying couldn't make that much of an impact?

" there are so many around the world"

Not really. Or rather, they are smaller in terms of market cap. Also - you basically have US and EU, the rest are very high risk, and subject to all sorts of shenanigans.

That's how much money the Saudis have.

We need to go clean nuclear, it would solve so many problems ...

They want it on better terms, and have access to companies not on stock markets including all those pets.coms

Giant leveraged buyout scheme for Saudi money? When you use scheme that suggests a pejorative. What do you mean?

Rephrasing that: Vision Fund is a front for Saudi Arabia doing LBO schemes in Western countries.

Saudi Arabia could already do LBOs in Western countries, well you think they can take out more leverage because of the restrictions on debt in Islamic culture?

I would say the Softbank entity shields them in case things go down, like after the things that went down.

At least nominally it does provide them a minute degree of risk isolation, and they surely want to have an executor better suited dealing with dotcom hipsters than some Saudi guy with beard and a hoodie.

> and they surely want to have an executor better suited dealing with dotcom hipsters than some Saudi guy with beard and a hoodie

Yes, but not for those reasons. The royal family stewards of any Saudi fund would have been educated in the US or Canada and very versed in these fields, and would be indistinguishable from all the people with middle easterner decent that have navigated Western institutions, like Steve Jobs.