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’GCC launches a Sovereign Health Fund for Bahrain and Oman
You’re familiar with SWFs — and the damage they can cause in the wrong hands — but on Thursday Bloomberg carried news of what we’ll call a Sovereign Health Fund (SHF):
The Gulf Cooperation Council plans to set up a fund worth more than $10 billion,
Moral hazard for the massess
What’s good for bankers should be good for everyone, right?
That’s certainly the view of the National Assembly of Kuwait, which on Wednesday voted through a bill demanding that the government buy up all consumer debt,
Is Cushing souring up the oil market?
Last week both Nymex and ICE began trading brand new oil futures linked to the Argus’ new Sour Crude Index — the ASCI.
The exchanges developed the futures in response to Saudi Aramco abandoning the Platts WTI benchmark in favour of the Argus sour benchmark back in October.
Camel finance
No, that’s not an outrageous slur. It’s a reference to this — the Souk al-Manakh.
This was former camel trading venue was home to the 1982 stock market crash in Kuwait, which wiped out many billions in regional wealth at the time. Older investors in the Gulf will see it as a history lesson for Dubai in how one localised problem can suddenly become much wider and deeper.
Banana emirate
We would call it a banana republic. But that would have been inaccurate.
Via Alea, the below, from AFP:
KUWAIT CITY (AFP) – Trading at the Kuwait Stock Exchange, the second largest Arab bourse, was halted Thursday following an unprecedented court order aimed at curbing the market’s slide and preventing massive losses among small investors.
Caution grows after run on Kuwait bank
The outlook for Kuwait’s banking system is turning negative for the first time in a decade, Moody’s said yesterday. The report comes days after a run on Gulf Bank, Kuwait’s second-largest commercial bank,
Kuwait intervenes in troubled bank
Kuwait moved to guarantee all local bank deposits and suspended trading in shares of the nation’s second-largest commercial bank yesterday after it was revealed it had made losses as a result of derivatives.
Kuwait casts doubt over Gulf currency union
Kuwait’s decision to delink its currency from the dollar last month has sent reverberations around the Gulf and beyond. Central bankers were surprised that Kuwait had broken ranks in spite of months of hints that it would act to offset the weakening US currency’s effect on raising import prices,
Kuwait abandons peg to sliding US dollar
Kuwait on Sunday removed its currency peg to the US dollar, throwing plans for Gulf currency union by 2010 into doubt and raising the prospect that other oil-producing states might abandon long-held dollar pegs.