Is state-owned really painful?

Yesterday the WSJ carried a commentary titled " State-owned Pain". It said that though govenment shopping or the so-called sovereign wealth fund actually is all the rages but problematic, because bureaucrats are not as good as private investors in making investment decisions.

For example,Singapore's Temasek Holdings, an investment firm fully owned by the city-state's Ministry of Finance reported a 29% fall in group net profit for thefiscal year ending March. It is the same case with China. Since Beijing bought Blackstone at 31 dollars a share in May, the stock has sagged to 24.39 dollars.

So it seems that a bureaucrat is not often making wise decision on investment, as the author concluded. However, I think the author is "framing" his argument, by not talking about the wrong decisions by private investors. It is true that the recent performance of the investment by both Singapore and China have failed to impress the financial observers, but one should not jump to conclusion that the government-controlled fun can't make good investment. Likewise, we can't say private investors always are wise in their investment decisions. There have been enough and well-known empirical evidences that private investors are not sage as well.