“Any continued weakness in the international oil price could prompt some oil-exporting countries to divert money from sovereign wealth funds to bolster their fiscal positions,” Anjalika Bardalai, deputy chief economist at TheCityUk, said by e-mail.

Other Gulf monarchies that have spent lavishly on public works to ensure the loyalty of their populations -- United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Qatar among them -- have all announced initiatives to preserve cash as the price drop in crude saps growth.

Glencore, Volkswagen

Abu Dhabi, home to the $773 billion Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, is reassessing its largest state companies with an eye toward selling assets, four people with knowledge of the matter said. The government and its entities have been running down reserves and withdrawing deposits from banks to fund their spending.

Qatar Investment Authority, which owns stakes in companies including Glencore Plc and Volkswagen AG, this week sold a stake in French construction company Vinci SA valued at about $400 million, just two months after it sold two London office buildings worth more than 550 million pounds ($842 million).

In Europe, Norway plans to spend 208 billion kroner ($25.4 billion) of its oil wealth next year, topping the 204 billion kroner it predicts it will receive from offshore oil and gas fields, according to the 2016 budget. That implies a net withdrawal from the fund of 3.7 billion kroner, after an inflow of 38 billion kroner this year.

Russia, which is being squeezed both by lower commodity prices and sanctions imposed by the U.S. and the European Union over the conflict in Ukraine, expects to spend as much as 4.7 trillion rubles ($75 billion) of the Reserve Fund, one of its two oil funds, this year and next to weather its first recession in six years. The two funds, which are invested mainly in U.S. and European government bonds, held the equivalent of $144 billion on Oct. 1, according to the Finance Ministry in Moscow.

Neighboring Kazakhstan, the second-largest oil producer in the former Soviet Union, plans to use about $4 billion of its $69 billion fund to support its economy this year. 

Yield Hunt

To be sure, sovereign funds aren’t just retrenching. Norway’s, for example, in search of higher returns, opened an office in Tokyo this week as the government in Oslo considers increasing the fund’s cap on investments in stocks from the current 60 percent.