Workers heave great hunks of iron and steel up vast construction cables… great machine-age pulleys send building parts up storey after storey… ever closer to the sweltering sun.

Passers by gawp at the great feats of engineering that tower above… the men high up in the giant structural shafts look down from up high see them as tiny blips… one of thousands of dots in the ever expanding City.

From the edge of Brooklyn to shore of Wall Street the trend is repeated for hundreds of miles… as far as the eye can see.

But the focus is on Manhattan…

The new financial centre of the world is riding high with the race to build the earth’s tallest building.

On one side is Walter P. Chrysler, founder of the eponymous motor company and his architect, William Van Alen. On the other is Alen’s old partner, H. Craig Severance, hard at work on the 70 storey Bank of Manhattan Trust Building on Wall Street…

Construction of the Chrysler Building began on September 19 and the contest between Alen and Severance is intensely fierce.

For over a year the two buildings are neck-and-neck.

Then at the last stretch – a mere two feet in it – Severance pips Alen to the finish line to claim the title.

But Alen has an ace up his sleeve…

Unbeknownst to anyone, he secretly constructs a 185 foot long spire inside the frame of the building.

On October 23rd, 1929, to the pride of the workmen… the gasps of the awe-struck on-lookers, businessmen and journalists… the spire is hoisted onto the top of the Chrysler Building’s dome and lowered into the 66th floor of the building.

The battle is won.

Fast forward to today: The stark reality of the 21st Century

The Chrysler Building was the first man-made structure to rise above 1,000 feet.

Its grand opening epitomised America’s financial might.

Of course, in boom-time New York, that title didn’t last for very long. It was trumped by the Empire State Building the next year.

Now I’ve always found the Chrysler Building the far sexier of the two – a genuine masterpiece of Art Deco architecture.

But yesterday, something happened that brings home a stark reality of the 21st Century… a century where America is no longer the financial King of all nations.

The New York Post broke the news that this American icon – one the great symbols of the West’s financial might – is likely to be sold to cash-rich Gulf investors…

The Arabs move in

The Abu Dhabi Investment Council – the Gulf Emirate’s smaller Sovereign Wealth Fund – is ready to pay $800 million for a 90% stake in the landmark building.

It’s a tiny amount for such a striking building. But it’s what this news represents that is huge.

The Arabs are moving in.

Only two weeks ago the Kuwait Investment Authority and the Qatar Investment Authority plunked-down $3.95 billion on four prize properties in New York – including the old GM Building.

Record oil prices gut America

Chrysler moved out of their iconic building years ago.

The company itself is an absolute mess…

The gas-guzzlers it specialised in fell out of favour in the mid-70s as oil prices skyrocketed… America’s motor industry declined.

And the Japanese with their smaller, fuel-efficient cars seized the initiative. By 1979, the Chrysler Corporation had to petition the United States government for $1.5 billion in loan guarantees to avoid bankruptcy…

Chrysler sold itself to the German auto giant Daimler in 1998 – officially a “merger of equals”.

Grafting Chrysler’s sub-prime onto their high-end brand was probably the dumbest move the Germans ever made. In 2007 they off-loaded it onto US private equity firm, Cerberus Capital Management, for $7.4 billion.

Good luck to them. Personally, I think the Arab’s purchase of the Chrysler Building is going to prove a far smarter investment than Chrysler itself.

I see surging oil prices wreaking havoc on what’s left of America’s manufacturing economy, just as they did in the 1970’s.

The latest figures from the US Commerce Department show the America’s trade deficit continues to soar. That’s almost entirely down to imports of crude oil and petroleum products. In April, crude-oil imports rose by $4.2 billion to $29.3 billion – a new record.

There’s plenty more to come. Because even those scary figures are only the result of oil at an average price of $96.81 a barrel.

That’s a long, long way below the close to $140 levels we’ve seen this month.

One way to get your cut of this phenomenal shift of wealth

All of this brings home an important point we at Profit Hunter use as our fundamental strategy towards our investments…

The balance of financial power is inexorably shifting eastwards… to the oil-exporters… and to Asian manufacturers.

America is being bled dry by higher oil prices. And the masters of this new petrodollar-dominated financial universe are picking the choicest bits of its carcass.

But we don’t lament this fact. Instead, we line up to get our cut.

Our Gulf merchant bank investment has a long track record of snapping-up undervalued U.S. icons. And right now they’re as undervalued as ever!

In the 1980’s it bought luxury retailers like Tiffany and Saks Fifth Avenue. It continues to build a top-drawer portfolio of American properties.

It bought the high-end 280 Park Avenue office complex last November, just a short walk away from the Chrysler Building itself.

You can bet that as America’s economy reels under the credit crunch and falling property prices; continues to haemorrhage dollars into the Gulf to pay for the oil it desperately needs… this one company is going to find plenty of new opportunities to add to its holdings.

If you’d like to review our higher tier “special situations” investing service, go here for more details, and I’ll send you details of our entire open positions immediately.

Regards,

Manraaj Singh
Editor
Profit Hunter

Source: Cash Rich Arabs Takeover New York

Now India and Japan appear poised to take up the aggressive pursuit for high returns with SWFs of their own.

India is considering a fund that would seek a higher return on $300 billion in foreign reserves that is currently tied up in U.S. Treasuries and government bonds, the Financial Times reported.

“It may be possible to argue that a part of the reserves, which may be considered in excess of usual requirements, be managed with the primary objective of earning higher returns,” Palaniappan Chidambaram, India’s finance minister, said in a written reply to Parliament.

According to Chidambaram, the Council on Trade and Industry recommended to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in a Dec. 18 meeting that the government “create a sovereign wealth fund of $5 billion to begin with, for financing acquisition of companies abroad.”

India’s foreign exchange reserves, the third-largest holdings in Asia, stood at a record $311.89 billion as of April 4, compared with China’s record $1.68 trillion, Japan’s $987.7 billion and Russia’s $508 billion.

However, analysts say that while the formation of an Indian SWF is likely, it will be significantly smaller than other funds of the same nature. As one of the world’s leading oil importers, India has not enjoyed the large trade surpluses delivered to other developing economies on the back of a commodities boom. India also maintains sizeable account and fiscal deficits.

The richest sovereign funds include the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, or AIDA ($875 billion), the Government of Singapore Investment Corp. ($330 billion), and Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global, or GPFG ($322 billion), although several others may be larger.

Meanwhile, Japan may establish a sovereign wealth fund to boost returns on some of its state assets as early as 2009, according to UBS Securities Japan Ltd.

“As cases of inefficient use of the road-specific budget have been disclosed in Diet discussions, the argument that public funds should not be managed by bureaucrats has become convincing,” Takashi Omori, chief Japan economist at UBS AG (UBS) in Tokyo, told Bloomberg News.

A relatively small state fund of between $98 billion (10 trillion yen) and $196 billion (20 trillion yen) may be created, he said.

Sovereign wealth funds currently control an estimated $3 trillion. That’s already believed to be more than the $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion held by worldwide hedge funds [though some sources put the hedge-fund estimate as high as $5 trillion].