"..... Just as the equity market looked cheap between 2003 and...

"..... Just as the equity market looked cheap between 2003 and 2007 to anybody who could source capital from the debt markets, it now looks cheap to anybody who can source it from oil (or Latin American mobile phone contracts?).

“Move over private equity, here come the oil-financed sovereign wealth funds (SWFs). The figures are mind-boggling – at current prices, total world oil reserves ($135 trillion) could buy the S&P 500 index eleven times over. Just one year of production ($3.3 trillion) would buy the whole MSCI Emerging Market index.”

The other big liquidity pool is Asian central banks, which are now sitting on $US4 trillion of foreign exchange reserves, up from $US1 trillion in 2001.

Private equity has a surprisingly resilient pool of liquidity ($US323 billion) but the buying power of this money has contracted dramatically with the availability of debt.

No, the real financial power now lies with those who are sitting on oil and gas. In Australia we have seen incredible wealth being generated out of the coal seam methane reserves in Queensland’s Surat Basin, thanks in part to a rise in the price of LNG towards parity with oil.

The world’s oil-rich – including the Australian gas producers – could emerge from the bear market as the new masters of the universe."

http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/Oil-killed-Gordon-Gekko-JDSMP?OpenDocument&src=sph