|By Matein Khalid| It is no coincidence that the most profitable hotels on the planet are located in Makkah, the holiest city of Islam as the site of the Grand Mosque and the Kaaba. For fifteen centuries, Muslims have traveled to Makkah from all over the world for the Hajj and Umrah pilgrimages, making the city the highest source of inbound foreign visitors in Saudi Arabia. Makkah is […]
|By Matein Khalid| Six data points last week reinforce my conviction that the GCC’s property/credit market stress will only accelerate in 2016. One, Standard and Poors downgraded Saudi Arabia’s sovereign credit rating to A- while Bahrain and Oman are now both below investment grade. The new sovereign credit downgrade cycle in the GCC comes at a time when sukuk/debt new issuance volumes have plummeted by 50%, the […]
|By Matein Khalid| The sultanate of Oman has enjoyed phenomenal economic development success in the 45 year reign of His Majesty Sultan Qaboos bin Said. Modern Oman is one of the true social, political and economic success stories of the Arab world. However, the Achilles heel of the Omani economy is its huge dependence on oil and gas export earnings, 60% of the sultanate’s GDP. Standard and […]
|By Matein Khalid| The global credit cycle has an immediate impact on the UAE via oil prices, the US dollar peg, cross border bank credit flows, Federal Reserve monetary policy and world trade. The IMF has cut its 2016 growth forecast to 2.6%, the lowest since 2010. A leading developer just booked a 20 fold rise in penalties from walkaway offplan home buyers. Banks hire “loan rangers” […]
|By Matein Khalid| “One country, two systems”. This was the historic formula under which Margaret Thatcher agreed to hand over the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China, then ruled by Paramount Leader Deng Xiao Ping. The Hong Kong dollar’s spike to 7.81, on the high end of its 7.75 – 7.85 band, demonstrates the sheer scale of the speculative attack against […]
|By Matein Khalid| The collapse in Brent crude oil below $30, a 20% fall in the Tadawul share index in January 2016’s global equity bloodbath, the cut in fuel subsidies and geopolitical risk escalation in the Middle East has spawned speculation in financial markets that Saudi Arabia will devalue the kingdom’s riyal, now pegged at 3.75 against the US dollar. Senior princes of the royal family and […]
|By Matein Khalid| I had called for Brent crude to fall to $30 in successive columns since the November 2014 OPEC conclave in Vienna, when Saudi Arabia abandoned its traditional role as the “swing producer” the central bank of black gold. The world oil markets now face a supply shock, a demand shock, epic volatility and the loss of the “swing producer”. The world is running out […]
|By Matein Khalid| This was the ghastliest week for global risk assets since September 2011. Not even 290,000 new US jobs in December could negate the raw fear on Wall Street generated by the 10% fall in Shanghai, a yuan depreciation, market meltdowns of 6 – 7% in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Frankfurt, Mumbai and New York. Four months ago, I had published a KT article titled “History’s […]
|By Matein Khalid| Emerging markets were an entirely predictable horror story once again in 2015. The oil/mining bust, currency meltdowns, China’s hard landing, sovereign credit downgrades, banking system crises, corruption scandals and geopolitical crises from Ukraine to Syria, the Black Sea to the South China Sea devastated investor wealth in emerging markets. India’s Sensex and Nifty were down 9% while the rupee has depreciated to 66 […]
|By Matein Khalid| In retrospect, the last six years were a unique period in global central banking, an epic monetary experiment that averted a Great Depression after Lehman’s failure and interbank/credit contagion plunged the world into recession in 2008-9. Yet the Fed (and later Bank of Japan, ECB and even PBOC) quantitative easing also led to asset bubbles, credit market excesses, currency wars and the mispricing of […]
|By Matein Khalid| The plunge in crude oil after OPEC’s Vienna conclave, Dr. Draghi’s failure to resist Bundesbank pressure not to fire another ECB easy money bazooka, Wall Street’s junk bond debacle and an imminent rise in the Fed Funds rate for the first time since 2006 will all shape the next big trades in Planet Forex. The Euro has risen to 1.10 on Draghi’s failure to […]
|By Matein Khalid| I was in a pensive-philosophic mood last week as I decompressed from a trip to a hauntingly beautiful post Soviet country in the Caucasus, the land that produced Koba from Gori and Prince Pyotr Bagration, the fallen hero of Tsar Alexander’s imperial guard at Borodino. Yet Georgia gave me time and perspective to think about the financial firestorms on Wall Street, Marounuchi, the Gulf […]
|By Matein Khalid| Saudi Arabia has fascinated me since I first met Hani AZ Yamani as a teenage student all those years ago at Wharton. Hani’s father was Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, legendary Saudi Oil Minister (1962-86) under Kings Faisal, Khalid and Fahd. Sheikh Yamani managed the 1973 and 1979 oil shocks, survived a terrorist assault in Vienna by Carlos the Jackal, midwifed the birth of Saudi […]
|By Matein Khalid| 2015 has been a horror story for emerging markets and Asian shares have not escaped the fallout from the 40% plunge in Shanghai/Shenzhen since June. Yet financial markets discount the future while UAE investors invariably extrapolate the recent past. So even while I resurrect the ghosts of 1998 when Suharto’s regime fell amid anti-Chinese riots in Jakarta, South Korea was forced to accept a […]
|By Matein Khalid| Even as China’s President meets the capo di tutti capi in Seattle, its manufacturing PMI falls to 47, a post Lehman low, with new export orders in a slump. I found it significant that the offshore yuan fell 200 pips to 6.4346 after the PMI. This proves my core argument, outlined a month ago. The Middle Kingdom will respond to its economic decline and […]
|By Matein Khalid| The world’s emerging markets have been savaged by multiple economic, banking, currency and political shocks since 2011. Global emerging markets are far too diverse and nuanced to be analyzed as a single asset class but now trade at a 24% valuation discount to developed markets. The financial markets now price draconian scenarios for earnings, exports, sovereign credit, industrial production and economic growth. The shortage […]
|By Matein Khalid| The Federal Reserve could well raise its overnight borrowing rate at the next FOMC monetary policy conclave on September 17. Though contagion from China’s 40% stock market meltdown has triggered bear markets from Hong Kong to Frankfurt and plunged Asian/emerging markets equities into ta ghastly replay of 1998’s epic meltdown (General Suharto’s overthrow, the Russian rouble default, Malaysia’s capital controls, the run on the […]
|By Matein Khalid| Hong Kong now trades at 9.6 times earnings and 0.86 book value. Hang Seng valuations were gutted by the protest movements in Central and the Shanghai financial meltdown. The Hang Seng index is down 25% since late May and now trades at six times forward earnings, its post Lehman, post 2014 bottom. Hong Kong trades at its lowest price/book value since the Asian flu […]
|By Matein Khalid| A month ago, I published a column predicting history’s first Made in China global recession. Wall Street finally agreed with me last week after we witnessed the most brutal crash in global equities since October 2008. I have predicated a 20% fall in US equities several times in the last three months and the 1000 point drop in the Dow last week only reinforces […]
|By Matein Khalid| Geopolitics is now another source of risk for the Turkish lira, government debt and Istanbul equities. The Turkish air force is bombing Daish in Syria and the secessionist Kurdish PKK party in northern Iraq. Suicide bombings have killed Turkish citizens in eastern Anatolian cities on the Syrian border. Ankara has given the US a green light to launch military airstrikes from the Incerlik air […]
|By Matein Khalid| Every global recession since the OPEC oil shocks of 1973-74 was triggered by a contraction in the $17 trillion US economic colossus. The failure of Lehman Brothers, the meltdown in US subprime mortgages, the impotence of the implicit “Fed/Uncle Sam” put, the ice age in the commercial paper and interbank money markets all tipped the US economy into recession in late 2008 and triggered […]
|By Matein Khalid|So Pearson PLC has sold the FT Group (with its flagship Financial Times newspaper) to Japan’s Nikkei Inc for $1.32 billion. Pearson will use the cash proceeds to increase its investment in education publishing businesses in the US and Canada, now 75% of revenues. This deal is a milestone in the history of newspaper publishing and my own life as an investor/financial journalist. I discovered […]
|By Matein Khalid| As a student of investing and the son of a painter/art historian, I cherish art as a visceral, spiritual value but am also intrigued by its historical linkage to banking and the financial markets. The happiest moments of my life have been spent in the Prado, Tate, Hermitage, Rijksmuseum, Ufizi, MOMA, Met, the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square, the Louvre, Musee d’Orsay and so […]
|By Matein Khalid| Last week was a roller coaster and the Nikkei Dow closed at 19,800. Abenomics has had a seismic impact on Japan’s economy, financial markets and banking system. The yen has fallen from 76 on the eve of the election in 2012 to 122 against the US dollar. Corporate profits have exploded. Land price rises, job growth, bonuses, capex and consumer spending have lifted Japan […]
|By Matein Khalid| De Gaulle dissed gold as a “barbarous relic” and Lenin sneered the yellow metal was fit only to “pave capitalist latrines”. So what? Gold has been an monetary metal in human history for centuries, back to the time of Pharonic Egypt, the Inca Empire, King Midas and the Spanish conquistadores of Mexico. While President Nixon removed the gold/dollar Bretton Woods linkage in 1971 and […]
/By Matein Khalid/The oil market has been a rollercoaster in 2016. A global financial panic triggered by China’s yuan depreciation caused Brent crude to fall below $30 a barrel in late January. I was amazed at the sheer scale of the speculative short positions accumulated by oil traders and hedge funds in both West Texas and Brent futures markets, the highest since the oil crash of 2008. The […]
