[lordgrenville]

As usual Matt Levine has a helpful take on this:

'Saudi “domestic investors could probably provide enough support to achieve that $2tn valuation.” Those domestic investors will probably pay the $2 trillion out of some combination of enthusiasm and, uh, “enthusiasm”...

'Look if WeWork could have ordered banks to lend money to investors to fund share purchases, and if it could have threatened people with arrest and torture if they didn’t buy shares, then I am pretty sure its IPO would have gone well. Aramco more or less can, which means that (1) there is a chunk of pretty inelastic demand at $2 trillion and (2) even if you are a foreign investor who thinks that the $2 trillion number is laughably high, you will be very diplomatic about expressing that in meetings with Aramco officials.'

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-28/effici...