Israel's bomb, and international finance as the undoing of foreign policy

Say you live in London, and just have a bank account. HSBC are a big one. The bank put out a memo in June 2011 advising its retail banking customers that HSBC "continue to see value in ThyssenKrupp", and the bank itself has a financial relationship with the group.

Say you live in New York and have a vast investment portfolio or pension fund for your retirement. Because of the structure of the institutional investment market, I can't feasibly see how you or your advisor could not have a financial relationship with ThyssenKrupp.

Consider: If you or your advisors manage your funds directly, you may very well use a JPMorgan Chase broking service. Even more likely, if you invest in a series of managed product or through your 401(k) retirement plan, chances are you or one of the firms you use will have a financial relationship with JPMorgan Chase – who in turn offer financial services and invest in ThyssenKrupp.

My probing's here are as deliberately tentative and basic as the transparency and actual connections are complex.

Perhaps I should have just riffed on this: Richard Fuld, the disgraced former CEO of Lehman Brothers installed his own private lift – a ThyssenKrupp – to keep him away from his staff as he zipped up each day to his executive suite. Perhaps it's this, business commentators were prone to ask, that kept him so out of touch with what was actually going on.

Anyway, many more of such stories and we'll forget that ThyssenKrupp's subsidiary also make Israeli subs. A forgivable mistake if one considers reportsthat even ThyssenKrupp executives didn't know about the Israeli contract with HDW!

Are Arab states funding Israeli subs?

But there's another layer of financial dealings at the heart of this story that are more interesting still: those at the level of states.

Governments have large pools of money to invest too. They are known as "sovereign wealth funds". In 2006 Norway established a fund now worth $315 billion from its sale of petroleum. The state of California has a retirement fund set up for public servants that is valued upwards of $220 billion.

Qatar, the owners of Al Jazeera, has a $100 billion investment arm with the express mandate to "invest in foreign assets". It's called the Qatar Investment Authority – let's call it QIA.

It is common practice for institutional investors like QIA to withhold the details of the assets that it holds at any one time – this is, after all, its own strategy.

It remains near impossible for me, therefore, to ascertain whether QIA holds stock in ThyssenKrupp or not – or any other company for that matter. One leading institute concedes that such studies are difficult since, stock holding and policy transparency is often lower for sovereign wealth funds than it is for other funds: