|
|
NEWS
| What next in oil and gold ? |
| THE bubble in gold, crude oil, silver, wheat, platinum, zinc, copper, nickel and virtually every major traded commodity in the world was dealt a double whammy by the Federal Reserve's bailout of Wall Street investment bank Bear Stearns and the FOMC's subsequent 75 basis point interest rate cut. |
| Third oil shock |
| THE two oil shocks of the 1970’s had a seismic impact on the world’s industrial constellation, financial markets, geopolitical alignments and competition for energy resources. |
| Bear Stearns: Nightmare on Wall Street |
| THE Federal Reserve chose JP Morgan to engineer a bailout of securities broker Bear Stearns after its funding base evaporated in the capital market amid rumours of imminent failure. |
| The new geopolitics of crude oil |
| GEOPOLITICS has haunted the international oil and gas market since the birth of the hydrocarbon age. The British Empire created the Hashemite kingdom of Iraq and sent combat troops to the Suez Canal after Winston Churchill converted the Royal Navy’s warships from coal to oil during World War One. |
| The tragedy and destiny of Citigroup |
| THE Goldilocks economy has morphed into something a lot more sinister, a Humpty Dumpty economy that not all of Helicopter Ben's horses, men and interest rates seem to be able to put together again. The Age of the Grizzly bear has dawned on Wall Street and mark to market is mark to meltdown in the credit markets, as LBO kings at Carlyle found out the hard way. |
| Death, danger and diplomacy in Damascus |
| DR Bashar Al Assad faces the gravest movement of danger in his political career ever since he succeeded his father as the president of Syria and head of the Arab world’s sole surviving Baathist dynastic dictatorship. |
| GCC investors and the future of hedge funds |
| THE fate of Fortress Group LLC, one of the world’s leading hedge funds groups, is symbolic of the losses faced by GCC investors in complex investment limited partnerships that depended on leverage to boost returns. Fortress went public on New York Stock Exchange in February 2007 and soared after their IPO but have lost half their value after the Wall Street credit meltdown led to a U-turn in investor sentiment. |
| Putin’s Kremlin and the Islamic world |
| PRESIDENT Dimitri Medvedev, Putin’s anointed and handpicked successor, will surely not deviate from the legacy of his predecessor in Russia’s international relations. After all, the new president has been a protégé of Putin since the beginning of his career in the St Petersburg Mayor’s office and Putin may well manipulate Kremlin politics as its eminence grise prime minister. |
| War, terror and a killing in Damascus |
| IT was ironic that Imad Mughniyah, Hezbollah’s special operations chief whose car and truck bombs slaughtered more than 300 human beings, died when his own Mitsubishi Pajero was ripped apart by a bomb blast in Kfar Soussa, an upscale Damascus neighbourhood. |
| The future of the GCC’s emerging capital markets |
| AS THE GCC states scale up infrastructure spending, attract FDI and international money managers and diversify their economies beyond oil and gas, the evolution of domestic capital markets becomes mission critical. |
© 2012 Khaleej Times, All rights reserved