Sovereign wealth funds, not single white females. Carla Bruni would probably cut him one.  I found this on ContrarianProfits:

Addressing the European Parliament, President Sarkozy implored his European contemporaries to embrace the current period of economic upheaval as an opportunity to restructure the global financial system. According to the Daily Telegraph, he also articulated the concern of many Western authorities that sovereign wealth funds, located primarily in Asia and the Middle East, could use their massive cash reserves to scoop up key foreign assets at extraordinarily low valuations.

“Stock markets are at historic lows. I do not want European citizens to wake up a few months from now and discover that European companies belong to non-European capital which has bought at the lowest point of the stock exchange,” Sarkozy said. “I would ask that all of us consider how interesting it would be to set up sovereign funds in each of our countries – and maybe these national sovereign funds could now and again coordinate to give an industrial response to the crisis.”

Good article, very technical, but I’ll summarize it: Sarkozy wants European countries to do what China and Abu Dhabi have done, that is, take their substantial foreign exchange reserves and invest it in something, like banks, or ports, or croissant factories, because otherwise China is going to swoop in and buy all the croissant factories and who knows what will happen.

The problem, of course, is that China and Abu Dhabi have money in reserve, while most European countries kinda do not:

Critics of Sarkozy’s request point out that Europe lacks adequate funding to create its own SWFs. The funds that sprang from Asia and the Middle East in recent years have huge pools of foreign exchange reserves and petrodollars to draw from. European nations don’t have these stockpiles of cash.

“We simply don’t have the money,” Joerg Kraemer, chief economist at Frankfurt-based Commerzbank AG (CRZBY) told Bloomberg.

So yeah, I have no idea how Sarkozy plans to fund the SWFs. Maybe he can take a metal detector with him when he’s out on the beach with Carla.