Archive for May, 2010

Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund (SWF), the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), is reported by the Financial Times to be interested in buying some of the U.S. Treasury’s 27% stake in Citigroup. Interestingly, while most other SWFs have shied away from bank investments after previously ill-timed ones in 2008, Qatar has fared well, notably from its investments in Credit Suisse and Barclays, according to the FT. QIA has $65 billion in assets, per a ranking of SWF assets on Wikipedia. There appears to be no mention of asset size on QIA’s website. In any event, the principals of TradeFlow21 view QIA’s potential investment as beneficial for all parties, including the capital markets at large.

Less than two weeks ago, General Electric and Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Commerce and Industry announced that they signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU), effectively reinvigorating their 70-year relationship. It should come as no surprise that GE’s areas of core competence and drivers of future growth — energy, healthcare, transportation, and water — are the same areas targeted as key growth sectors for Saudi Arabia. TradeFlow21 views GE and Saudi Arabia as economic juggernauts: longstanding excellence in industrial know-how and manufacturing in the case of the former, and an agglomeration of capital and capital-intensive investment projects for economic sustainability for the latter. While news of such an MoU bodes very well both for GE and Saudi Arabia, and the global economy at large, unfortunately it was easily overshadowed by ongoing fears of the Greek debt crisis and most recently, the specter of panic selling on Wall Street last Thursday. Nevertheless, the founders of TradeFlow21 remain convinced that the Middle East, and Saudi Arabia in particular, represents both an opportunity and a model for real economic investment.