30 m below the surface
Soundings
Every attempt to measure the depth, and why none is verifiable
Everyone who quotes a size for GIC is sounding a depth the owner refuses to call out. This page collects the soundings — official, third-party, and one this chart takes itself — with each method's weakness set down as plainly as its result.
The official floor official
“well over US$100 billion”
the Ministry of Finance's complete public statement of GIC's scale
Deliberately unhelpful: the true figure is universally understood to be several times this floor, and the phrasing has stood unchanged for years. MOF ↗
Third-party soundings estimated
| Who | Estimate | Recorded | Their own confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Global SWF | US$1,161bn | 2026-08-01 | the page itself notes GIC's AuM 'continues to be a mystery' |
No third-party estimate of GIC's size is verifiable, including this one. They are recorded here as claims with dates, not as facts.
This chart's own sounding estimated
The rule is public: the contribution may not exceed half of the expected long-term real return on the relevant net assets of GIC, MAS and Temasek, after Government liabilities. Run it backwards from FY2026's draw of S$28.5bn, assuming the Government takes close to the full half it is allowed:
| If the expected real return is… | Implied net assets, all three entities | …less Temasek's published S$518bn |
|---|---|---|
| 3% real | ≈ S$1,899bn | ≈ S$1,381bn |
| 4% real | ≈ S$1,424bn | ≈ S$906bn |
| 5% real | ≈ S$1,139bn | ≈ S$621bn |
| 6% real | ≈ S$949bn | ≈ S$431bn |
Arithmetic, not knowledge — set in italic for that reason. Every cell inherits four unverifiable assumptions: that the full 50% is drawn (the actual fraction is unpublished); the expected-return figure itself (unpublished — the 4–5% rows are merely consistent with GIC's published 20-year real returns); Temasek's inclusion at full published value (the framework nets Government liabilities that are not itemised publicly); and that “relevant assets” matches this simple sum. The spread down one column is the honest error bar: about a factor of two. This sounding can bound an order of magnitude — several hundred billion to over a trillion Singapore dollars across the three entities — and genuinely nothing finer.