A year ago, before the financial crisis started to bite hard, the US and Europe were worried that Asian and Middle East nations, armed with a mighty war chest of surplus foreign exchange reserves from their exports of manufactured goods and oil, would gobble up so-called strategic assets in the west.
Then, as the credit crunch turned into a recession, the state-owned investment agencies, known as sovereign wealth funds, were being hailed as saviours of teetering banks and companies.
Today, like many private institutional investors, the sovereign wealth funds of China and other Asian states are saddled with huge paper losses and reviewing what to do. Last week, Singapore's Temasek Holdings announced that its chief executive officer, Ho Ching, a technocrat who is married to Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, would be replaced by Charles Goodyear, the former chief executive of mining and resources giant BHP Billiton.
The change at Temasek - which reported assets around the world worth US$134 billion last March - is part of a much wider review process by top executives and governing boards of global investing groups.
Morgan Stanley estimates that the value of equities, property and other assets owned by such funds dropped by as much as 25 per cent last year, causing losses of between US$500 billion and US$700 billion.
Some funds, especially those of countries with big domestic economies, are facing pressure to invest more at home instead of abroad. The French government announced in November that it would establish a Euro20 billion (HK$199.6 billion) sovereign wealth fund not just to help local companies cope with the effects of the credit freeze but also to prevent the takeover of strategic French firms by 'foreign predators'.