Kuwait's Wealth: A Brief History of the World's Oldest Sovereign Wealth Fund

Kuwait was a pioneer of Gulf finance long before the modern sovereign-wealth-fund era. The Kuwait Investment Board was founded in London in 1953 — eight years before independence — to invest surplus oil revenues. Today its successor, the Kuwait Investment Authority (KIA), manages an estimated US$800+ billion across the General Reserve Fund and the Future Generations Fund (FGF).

A statutory 10% of all state revenues is transferred to the FGF each year, and the fund cannot be drawn upon without parliamentary approval. This long-horizon discipline has produced one of the most globally diversified institutional portfolios in the world, with anchor positions in Daimler, BP, Logan Circle Partners and a wide network of real-estate and private-equity exposures.

Domestically, Kuwait's merchant families — Al Sabah, Al Kharafi, Al Ghanim, Alshaya and Behbehani — built much of the modern non-oil economy across construction, retail and franchise distribution. While political gridlock has slowed structural reform, the FGF's compounding remains a remarkable case study in intergenerational wealth.