Somebody out there is making money, despite all the doom-and-gloom news about the global economy.

The Financial Times reports that British art auctioneers Sotheby’s and Christie’s are predictiung a bumper sale of artworks this month. Together they estimate they will sell about $790m in artworks over 10 days at the sales of Impressionist, Modern and contemporary art.

The FT puts the rise in art sales down to the boom in oil and other commodities — money-laden oil barons, it seems, love nothing more than spending ludicrous amounts of cash on old paintings.

Sotheby’s says 21% of its lots last year was bought by new buyers. It also said that bidders from the Middle East, China, Russia and India have become twice as active in the market.

The oil boom is certainly transforming the distribution of global wealth. According to Manraaj Singh Arab oil wealth will dwarf the US economy by 2015…

Sovereign wealth funds already control $3.5 trillion in assets – that’s more than the U.K. French or German economies are worth. But that’s nothing compared to what’s still to come…

By 2015, their assets will be worth more than the entire U.S. economy and by 2016 they will overtake the European Union.

Leave China out of that equation and practically all those sovereign wealth funds are being boosted by the rising price of oil.

And the fastest growing funds are based in oil producing countries that don’t figure on most investor’s maps.

In the last five years, Nigeria’s SWF has grown by 291%, Oman’s by 256%. Kazakhstan’s SWF is up 162%; Angola’s by 84%…

Now you can’t invest directly in a sovereign wealth fund, but they’re an excellent way of keeping track of where the money is going today and where the biggest economic booms are happening right now…

The point that I’m trying to drive home here is that high oil prices aren’t going to benefit all the oil producers equally.

The real tide of petrodollars is flowing to the OPEC countries. The big winners are going to be countries like Nigeria and Angola, Venezuela and Bahrain… and we can already see the winners and losers in the new equation.

Here at Profit Hunter we are well placed to benefit from this tide of wealth, which can only increase in the years ahead.

We aren’t directly invested in oil. There are too many unknowns that go into its price. Instead we are focussed on uncovering the investment opportunities being opened up by this dramatic shift in economic power.

And we have no doubt that that shift is going to continue.

We’ve been emphatic that we are now in the era of $100 oil. I doubt that we are ever going to see it go back below that price for a sustained period.

What does all of this mean for us as investors?

Simple — if we can tap into the same pools of capital that are fuelling the growth of these sovereign wealth funds, we are going to be on to very good thing indeed.