While we wring our collective hands about how the infrastructure companies are going to lose all their business as crude drops from $100 to $75, and projects will be cancelled due to their rich customers actually giving a rat's behind if crude is $100 or $75 let's take a look at reality. I noticed a story in the NY Times this weekend on Saudi Arabia - so I'd like to overlay that with just a snapshot of what is going on in some of the other countries in this part of the world - the Kuwaits, the Oman's, the Abu Dhabi's, the Qatar's....

... because perhaps I think most of us still are very inward looking as Americans and do not realize what is truly going on in this globe. I keep returning to the theme of this transfer of wealth - each day we become more of a debtor nation and our wealth is being transferred out. Only to return to buy our assets from beneath us (and not just banks). If not with imports (to Asia) than with the "great tax" that is petrol. A "tax" on all of us, and our country as a whole. Instead of devoting resources to stop taxing ourselves, we just give lip service or misguided pushes into corn ethanol of all things. We just don't seem too worried about it, because it's a creeping problem - it's incremental, like erosion (or inflation). I would like to highlight we are in a global economic 'competition', but there seems to be very little awareness of this from 'leadership'. Thankfully, we have some of the most financially innovative institutions to lead us through this.... errr, wait. Never mind that. But that's neither here nor there as an investor; I'll let others argue about the implications - I have my views, but I am just trying to make money off the trends. But I do have to say, it is interesting to see an over reaching national vision proposed by many of these "3rd world" countries 'leadership' - something we used to do here... but I guess you need money to do any large scale projects; along with a government that can actually pass something useful and not only in self interest.

Now as with all good booms (as we see in Asia and the Middle East) there is no clean situation - there will be intermittent booms and mini-busts, but I am speaking to the greater long term trend here. Specific to the Middle East, it appears this go around, as opposed to the 70s, the countries realize that their oil reserves are not unlimited and this time they are reinvesting the monies in ways that can leverage today's riches into future rewards. Maybe they'll succeed, maybe they won't, but they seem intent on trying. A very key point, and why I think the global engineering/infrastructure bull market is here to stay for a long time (again with mini busts along the way as things get overheated from time to time).

So we start in Saudi Arabia (above picture is the new King Abdullah Economic City proposal)

• Amid a forest of cranes, towers and beams rising from the desert, more than 38,000 workers from China, India, Turkey and beyond have been toiling for two years in unforgiving conditions — often in temperatures exceeding 100 degrees — to complete one of the world’s largest petrochemical plants in record time.
• By the end of the year, this massive city of steel at the edge of the Red Sea will take its place as a cog of globalization: plastics produced here will be used to make televisions in Japan, cellphones in China and thousands of other products to be sold in the United States and Europe. Construction costs at the plant, which spreads over eight square miles, have doubled to $10 billion because of shortages in materials and labor. The amount of steel being used is 10 times the weight of the Eiffel Tower.
• “I’ve worked on many big things in my life, but I’ve never worked on anything this big,” an American project manager mused during a bus tour of the project, called Petro Rabigh, a joint venture of the state-run oil company Saudi Aramco and Sumitomo Chemical of Japan.
• Size isn’t the only consideration. The project is Saudi Arabia’s boldest bet yet that this oil-rich kingdom can transform itself into an industrial powerhouse. The plant is part of a $500 billion investment program to build new cities, create millions of jobs and diversify the economy away from petroleum exports over the next two decades.
• “The Saudi economy was in idle mode for 20 years,” said John Sfakianakis, the chief economist at SABB, formerly known as the Saudi British Bank, who is based in Riyadh, the Saudi capital. “Today, the feeling here is, ‘We’ve won the lottery; let’s not waste it.’ ”
• The kingdom’s lofty economic goals would have been unthinkable without the surge in energy prices that has filled the coffers of oil producers. Oil prices have quadrupled since 2002 and reached $100 a barrel in New York this month.
• Persian Gulf countries earned $1.5 trillion in oil revenue from 2002 to 2006, twice as much as in the previous five-year period, according to the Institute of International Finance, a global association of banks that is based in Washington.