With all this talk about bailouts here in the U.S., one name is conspicuously absent: Sovereign Wealth Funds. These trillion-dollar national funds made news earlier in the year as they dove headway into big U.S. banks when they began to teeter. The SWFs figured they were buying low, severely underestimating the bottom of the market. So rather than get a bargain, they took a beating – and are now making a hasty retreat from the West.

The recent discovery of two massive Brazilian oil fields may end the US’s reliance on Middle East crude.

According to Bloomberg:

Saudi Arabia’s influence as the biggest oil exporter would wane if the fields are as big as advertised, and China and India would become dominant buyers of Persian Gulf oil, said Peter Zeihan, vice president of analysis at Strategic Forecasting in Austin, Texas.

Investors have pulled $98 billion out of equity funds in the first quarter of 2008, according to Emerging Portfolio Fund Research (EPFR).

The Financial Times  describing the outflow of cash as “a record shift that accelerates a longer-term trend away from US and western European stock markets” caused by the credit crisis and subprime mess in the US.

“The outflows also accelerate a trend for investors to put their money either in ultra-safe cash options such as money market funds, or into riskier markets and high-fee products such as hedge funds,” according to the report. “They are abandoning the middle ground of mainstream equity and fixed income funds, especially in the developed markets.”

Investors pulled $70bn from US, Japan and Western Europe funds…