Last Tuesday, I told Taipan Publishing Group subscribers in Taipan Insider that one Middle Eastern country was injecting massive amounts of cash into international markets.

That’s not really news nowadays, though, is it? Everyone’s heard of the $7.5 billion Citigroup bailout by Abu Dhabi back in November 2007.

But things have noticably been slowing down. When billions of dollars worth of investments get halved in value in less than a year, it makes you think.

Yet for some regions, this credit crunch is an opportunity of a lifetime.

Think about it. You’re an oil-rich nation with foreign currency reserves well into the hundreds of billions. Major global institutions are searching desparately for cash. Their fellow financial institutions are equally cash-strapped.

Suddenly, your country has a lot of power.

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A fun little bit of news out of the beautiful city of Prague today…

The first Burger King (BKC:NYSE) will open in Prague in the next few months. And it’s not only targeting the Czech Repbulic. It wants to become number one in European markets. To do that, it’s already got operations in Poland, Bulgaria and Hungary, and it planning joints in Slovakia and Slovenia.

But it’s got tough competition from McDonald’s (MCD:NYSE), who is top dog right now with 70 restaurants serving 53 million customers. It’s spent more than $172.2 million on restaurants in the Czech Republic.

When I was in Budapest, I grabbed a Whopper for a quick lunch before meeting my guide back at the hotel, Buro Panzio. It cost me 750 Forint, which is about $3.75 or so, and the place was packed. My last night in Budapest, I hit the town with some new friends, and ended up back at BK for a late-night snack. It was still packed, and one young, drunk, teenager was thrown out for misbehaving and bothering the customers.

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Call it a triple-edged sword… or a dog and pony show with cats… or a rain of fire…

Or you can just call it plain old nonsensical. That’s what the past few days have been for Latin American markets. From the Mexican border to the tip of Cape Horn, Chile, markets have tumbled fiercely on the news that both Brazil and Argentina are injecting government into the private investment sector.

Brazil’s government wants its state-controled banks to buy stakes in private financial institutions. The announcement, made on Wednesday, did not include any names, but there are several well-known institutions that could be affected by this:

Banco Bradesco (BBD:NYSE)
Banco Itau Holding Financeira (ITU:NYSE)
Unibanco (UBB:NYSE)

Things may be a little worse in Argentina. President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner announced that the government will take over the $30 billion private pension fund.

She said that Argentina must protect its retirees, and that the country’s constitution requires the president to provide pensions. Last year when the government allowed citizens to chose between privatized pensions and government pensions, only 20% of all people with pensions chose the government’s plan.

In response, markets plummeted.

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Consolidation comes in many forms… Buying up assets or operations, buying stakes in operations or companies, merging operations, takeovers, the list goes on and on.

But one thing that has started gaining interest in the mainstream media is exchange consolidation.

Remember last summer when the Chicago Merchantile Exchange bought the Chicago Board of Trade? Or when the Group decided to by Nymex the following March for $11 billion? Or when NYSE Euronext bid for AMEX? When Nasdaq wanted to buy London and the OMX?

These merging markets offer considerable cost savings, a uniform platform, and an ease of cross-transactions that could ultimately create a “flat world” of international trading.

This behavior is starting to trickle into emerging markets as regional stock exchanges gain market capitalization and foreign interest. For example, Wiener Börse, operator of the Vienna stock market, just announced that it would buy the majority stake in the Prague Stock Exchange.

The deal is worth about $264 million, and Wiener Börse beat out other regional rivals, like Deutsche Boerse and the OMX Nordic Exchange. The Warsaw Exchange, Wiener Börse’s main competitor, was kept out of the bidding process because it’s a state-owned business.

But this isn’t the first market Vienna’s gotten its paws on…

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