By Rushdi Siddiqui

Daud Vicary Abdullah is an authority on Islamic banking and has contributed to a number of books on the subject.

He has been in the finance and consulting industry for more than 38 years, with significant experience in Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. Meet Daud Vicary Abdullah, the president and CEO of International Centre of Education in Islamic Finance (Inceif), the global university of Islamic finance.
Read More

January 8, 2012

By Fitch Ratings

Spending by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 2012 will likely be higher than budgeted, but the country will still run a fiscal surplus of 4% of GDP, says Fitch Ratings.

Spending growth will moderate in 2012 compared with last year. In 2011, spending growth reached 24%, the highest in a decade. The government raised public sector wages, created government jobs, injected capital into state-owned lenders and pledged more resources for housing. Capital spending - mainly on infrastructure - exceeded 12% of GDP.
Read More

Excerpt from Citibank report:

In October this year, $16.9bn of projects were awarded across MENA. On a cumulative basis, just over $82bn of projects have been awarded across the region in the year to end October. This compares favourably with FY10 when almost $80bn of projects were awarded. Saudi Arabia is the main driving force accounting for a third of the 2011 total. Iraq accounts for 20%.The UAE has awarded almost $14bn in the year to end October, almost $20bn below FY10.
Read More

By Alon Ben-Meir

Due to a host of common denominators in the Arab world including the lack of traditional liberalism, the tribes’ power, the elites’ control of business, the hold on power by ethnic minorities, the military that cling to power, and the religious divide and Islamic extremism, the Arab Spring could sadly turn into a long and cruel winter. These factors are making the transformation into a more reformist governance, slow, filled with hurdles and punctuated with intense bloodshed. At the same time, each Arab country differs characteristically from one another on other dimensions including: history and culture, demographic composition, the role of the military, resources, and geostrategic situations. This combination of commonality and uniqueness has had, and will continue to have, significant impacts on how the uprising in each Arab country evolves and what kind of political order might eventually emerge.

Read More

Deutsche Bank is bullish about next year, i.e. if Europe does not capitulate, the United States does not return to its poor growth and Asia does not suffer a hard landing.

In the eyes of Deutsche Bank analysts, Europe holds the key to global growth. Admittedly, this is slightly myopic thinking given that the world does not revolve around the EU. We have already seen the United States and Asia chug along even as Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy imploded one after
the other. Perhaps that’s a natural home bias of all OECD banks. READ MORE HERE

By Rushdi Siddiqui, Global Head of Islamic Finance, Thomson Reuters

‘Don’t cheat the world of your contribution. Give it what you’ve got.’ - Steven Pressfield

On November 22, 2011, the world’s first Islamic interbank benchmark rate (IIBR) was launched. It is the result of a collaborative approach taken by many Islamic financial institution, industry associations, and Shariah scholars, over the course of 24 months, to a decades-old industry challenge: how to decouple Islamic finance from a conventional Western pricing benchmark (LIBOR) and the law of necessity when an ‘Islamic’ alternative was not available. The objective was to support and preserve Islamic finance authenticity.
Read More

openDemocracy /Foter

By Alon Ben-Meir

In the wake of the Arab Spring and Prime Minister Erdogan’s championing of political reforms throughout the Arab world, it has now become more urgent than ever before to find an equitable solution to the Turkish-Kurdish conflict. Short of finding an immediate resolution to this debilitating struggle will not only severely compromise Turkey’s suggested model of successfully combining Islam and democracy, but it will additionally bankrupt its moral standing as it willfully continues to discriminate against 15 million Kurds who represent one-fifth of its population.
Read More

• 25 Rapid Growth Markets (RGMs) to grow by an average of 6.2% this year and by 5.9% in 2012, compared with 1.6% growth for the Eurozone this year falling to 0.6% next year.

• Qatar had the highest nominal GDP (US$) per capita at PPP in 2010 among the 25 RGMs and has also been the fastest growing economy over the last decade, with an average growth of 13%.

The dynamics of the global economy have changed with a new set of fast-growing markets challenging the position of the established advanced economies. The rapid growth markets (RGMs) are expected to grow collectively by 6.2% this year, almost four times more than the anemic growth expected in the Eurozone according to Ernst & Young’s new quarterly Rapid Growth Markets Forecast (RGMF).
Read More

2011 was the year of black swans - those highly improbable occurrences that turn the world economy on its head. So what black swans could be in store for 2012? Central banks losing control over inflation, as a result of their policy of monetising sovereign debt to excess; or perhaps European growth in excess of 1.2%, a positive scenario that no economist is forecasting on today.
Read More

The UAE economy started to recover in 2010, though more modestly than in neighboring GCC countries. Benefiting from higher oil prices and strong demand from traditional trading partners in Asia, real GDP grew by an estimated 3.2 percent in 2010.

Nevertheless, because of the real estate overhang and continued uncertainties about the solvency of GREs, growth remained below the regional average of 5 percent. The 12-month consumer price (CPI) inflation rate was subdued at 1.7 percent in December 2010, up from -0.3 percent at end-2009.
Read More