|By Matein Khalid| 2018 has been a difficult year for GCC and Dubai real estate. Rents and capital values continued to fall in the third quarter, albeit at different rates in specific segments and micro-markets. The Federal Reserve’s latest monetary tightening at the September 26 FOMC means the six months Emirates Interbank Offered Rate (EIBOR), the bellwether rate for floating rate home mortgages in the UAE is […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| Banks in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) should continue to breathe a little easier in the year ahead. Barring any major increase in geopolitical risk or a sharp fall in oil prices, 2019 should mark a stabilization of GCC banks’ financial profiles, following three years of significant pressure, Standaard & Poor’s said in its latest review. What’s more, with the transition to IFRS […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| In an unusual move, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund,which is a stake holder in Elon Musk’s Tesla, has invested $1 billion in rival Silicon Valley start-up Lucid Motors. This means the Saudis will benefit, irrespective of which new generation car company achieves leadership in this automobile sector. Lucid is set to start making its first model, the Air sedan, in 2020. The comapny […]
Is the human race winning? It seems that the answer is no. We go slowly along a pathway that plays with the notion of progress. We digress constantly from focussing upon what would fix issues of division, disagreement and despair. The fundamentals are wrong. This is because we became strong believers of what deceives us. We see policies formulated on the basis of hatred, and not practicality. […]
By James M. Dorsey Dug in for the long haul in its increasingly bitter dispute with the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, Qatar is emerging as a key player in efforts to prevent tension between Israel and Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza, from spinning out of control. Qatar’s increasing role counters Saudi and UAE efforts to shape Palestinian politics in their mould. It further […]
|By Matein Khalid| Crude oil prices plunged by 7% in two sessions as Saudi Arabia and Russia confirmed that they would release 1 million barrels a day in the wet barrel markets. Speculative froth in the oil futures markets vanished, to be replaced by a new trading calculus based on the realities of supply and demand – as well as the unknowable (and unquantifiable!) arc of […]
By James M. Dorsey A look at a decade of failed social, economic and political reform in Jordan goes a far way to explain recent mass anti-government protests demanding the resignation of the government. The protests, prompting concerns about the survival of the Hashemite dynasty, also bear witness to the fallout of the region’s epic power struggles and the pitfalls of government failures to respond to long-standing […]
|By Matein Khalid| I had written an article titled “six reasons to be bullish Saudi equities in 2018, published in the KT on January 28. Yet I was surprised to see Saudi Arabian equities become the world’s second best performing stock market in 2018 after Egypt. The Saudi equity index fund (KSA) I recommended in my column is up 18% at a time when the MSCI emerging markets […]
|By Arabian Pot Staff| The current tailwind in the oil market is likely to propel 100 new offshore projects to be sanctioned in 2018, according to Rystad Energy. This compares to only 60 projects in 2017 and below 40 in 2016, as shown in the latest Oilfield Service Report by Rystad Energy. These projects represent a collective $100 billion worth of capital investment, giving an average of […]
By Matein Khalid A dismal legacy of civil war, sanctions, insurgency, foreign invasion and terrorism has had a catastrophic impact on the Iraqi economy. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi told the assembled global elite at Davos 2018 that Iraq needed $100 billion in postwar construction. Yet money alone will not solve Iraq’s problems of systemic corruption, a society divided by sectarian cleavages, poverty, the displacement of 2 million […]
Dubai property prices are falling at increased speed. The Dubai Residential Property Sales Price Index for all residential estates decreased by 2.6 points, from 248.7 to 246.1, which represents a decline of 1.05 per cent in March 2018, according to the latest REID report. Prices also went down by 4.76 per cent year on year. Apartment sales prices registered a decrease in March 2018 with a drop […]
By James M. Dorsey Bangladesh, in a twist of irony, is looking to Saudi Arabia to fund a $ 1 billion plan to build hundreds of mosques and religious centres to counter militant Islam that for much of the past decade traced its roots to ultra-conservative strands of the faith promoted by a multi-billion dollar Saudi campaign. The Bangladeshi plan constitutes the first effort by a Muslim country to enlist […]
By James M. Dorsey Iranian leaders are struggling, three months after anti-government protests swept the Islamic republic, to ensure that environmental issues that helped sparked a popular uprising in Syria in 2011 leading to a brutal civil war don’t threaten the clergy’s grip on power. Like Syria, Iran has been confronting a drought that has affected much of the country for more than a decade with precipitation dropping to its lowest […]
By James M. Dorsey In his effort to improve Saudi Arabia’s badly tarnished image and project the kingdom as embracing an unidentified form of moderate Islam, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has hinted that he envisions a conservative rather than an ultra-conservative society, but not one in which citizens are fully free to make personal, let alone political choices of their own. Prince Mohammed’s vision, although […]
By James M Dorsey The Middle East has a knack for sucking external powers into its conflicts. China’s ventures into the region have shown how difficult it is to maintain its principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other states. China’s abandonment of non-interference is manifested by its (largely ineffective) efforts to mediate conflicts in South Sudan, Syria and Afghanistan as well as between Israel and Palestine and even between Saudi […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| The Dubai residential market witnessed solid growth in off-plan sales transactions during the last quarter of 2017. According to a recent report by global real estate consultancy firm CBRE, off-plan sales accounted for more than 65 per cent of total sales transactions for the year ending 2017, an increase of approximately 56 per cent in the number of transactions and 44 per cent in […]
Heart Disease – An infographic by GeriatricNursing.org Every year over 1.2 million people suffer from a heart attack due to coronary heart disease. The probability that a person may die from heart attack is 40 out of 100. According to the latest estimations, more than 335,000 of these heart attack patients are estimated to die even before reaching the hospital or the emergency ward. In the […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| Flight bookings for travel to the Middle East and Africa grew by 10.5 percent in 2017 and growth is set to continue in the first quarter of 2018, as bookings are currently 11.2 percent ahead of where they were at this time last year according to ForwardKeys, the company that helps forecast future travel by analysing around 17 million flight booking transactions a […]
|By Matein Khalid| I had projected a bloodbath in the US Treasury bond market since late 2016, when it was obvious that Trump’s tax reform would double the US budget deficit at the same time as the Federal Reserve prepared to “normalize” or shrink its balance sheet by $470 billion. Fiscal stimulus is often a policy ballast amid a depression, as in the early 1980’s or 2009, not […]
|By Matein Khalid| When I first started on a Treasury bond futures trading desk in New York fresh out of Wharton, a senior mentor once advised to keep track of the four heartbeats of gold finance in real time. The price of money (interest rates), the price of currency (the US dollar), the price of oil and the price of gold. The price of money can be […]
|By Matein Khalid| Dubai based Gulf Islamic Investments (GII) acquired a one million square foot Amazon logistics center in Dortmund, Germany for $144 million. This deal is a testament to the boutique global merchant bank created in Dubai by GII’s co-founder/CEO Pankaj Gupta, who I am honored to call a friend. I consciously model my own firm Asas Capial on the strategic path laid out by GII and […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| Dubai rental yields have trended lower structurally since 2009, indicating that investors are willing to accept risk with lower risk premia. Of all the major cities analyzed, Dubai remains far above the highest yielding city, suggesting that there is ample room for further yield compression, according to property portal Reidin. In the first nine months of 2017, even though level of transactions are […]
|By Matein Khalid|The rise in Brent crude to $60 a barrel and the trade volume ballast generated by the world’s first post Lehman synchronized economic recovery is hugely positive for UAE economic growth in 2018. After all, the UAE is unique because Abu Dhabi’s 100 billion barrels of proven oil reserves is complemented by Dubai’s role as the Gulf’s financial, logistics, aviation, shopping and services hub. The […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| Gold prices were on track for their biggest weekly fall since May ahead of US employment data later that could influence the pace of US interest rate rises. The yellow metal broke below a recent trading range and tumbled through technical levels to its lowest since July as progress on US tax reform fuelled optimism about the US economy and boosted the dollar. […]
