My Credit Card

The lede on the front page of the Times yesterday read:
Flush with petrodollars, oil-producing countries have embarked on a global shopping spree.

Just in time for shopping sprees here at home -- 'tis the season.

Yesterday, Wednesday, Nov. 28, The Abu Dhabi Investment Corp. firmed plans to spend $7.5 billion and become the largest single share holder in Citigroup.

The issue of stockholder percentage has to do with who has control over the company; as in, who makes the decisions for a company -- who are company decision makers responsible to. Stockholders. While the ADI will still only own 4.9 percent of Citigroup at the end of the deal, it still seems to me to bring globalization home.

The "What's in your wallet" slogan comes to mind... Citigroup is in my wallet.

Reuters reports this morning:
The sale to the $650 billion Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, the world's largest sovereign wealth fund, may also signal the freefall in U.S financial stocks is close to ending, analysts said.

I don't know, the shoring up of a huge American financial institution seems like a good thing to me. But there's something extremely uncomfortable in the connections between oil prices soaring, stocks plummeting and the situation in the Middle East.

My credit card. My debt. My heating oil. My needs.
Again, do we kill -- as in drain the life force from -- that which we define, own, desire to control.
Oil wealth.
Somehow I can't figure a way to put that into a "my" sentence. And yet, there seems to be a lot of killing going on.