Wall Street’s Eyes on Riyadh Just as Wealth Fund Pivots Home
Bloomberg 1/27/2021 Abeer Abu Omar, Matthew Martin and Vivian Nereim
(Bloomberg) Saudi Arabia’s $400 billion sovereign wealth fund will find it tough to repeat its success of recent years when it made its mark globally as a source of cash for asset managers, tech entrepreneurs and tycoons.
Ahead of the kingdom’s flagship investment conference this week, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman laid out the fund’s strategy through 2025. It’ll spend at least $40 billion a year at home, creating new cities and industries, along with 1.8 million jobs. It plans to more than double assets it controls to over 4 trillion riyals ($1.1 trillion), putting it on par with the current size of Norway’s sovereign fund, the world’s biggest.
Wall Street’s Eyes on Riyadh Just as Wealth Fund Pivots Home
Bloomberg 1/27/2021 Abeer Abu Omar, Matthew Martin and Vivian Nereim
(Bloomberg) Saudi Arabia’s $400 billion sovereign wealth fund will find it tough to repeat its success of recent years when it made its mark globally as a source of cash for asset managers, tech entrepreneurs and tycoons.
Ahead of the kingdom’s flagship investment conference this week, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman laid out the fund’s strategy through 2025. It’ll spend at least $40 billion a year at home, creating new cities and industries, along with 1.8 million jobs. It plans to more than double assets it controls to over 4 trillion riyals ($1.1 trillion), putting it on par with the current size of Norway’s sovereign fund, the world’s biggest.
European Economy Lags China and U.S. on Pandemic Recovery
Bloomberg 1/27/2021 Craig Stirling
(Bloomberg) Europe’s economy is starting to follow the familiar script of lagging its international peers when recovering from a crisis.
That was the upshot of the International Monetary Fund’s forecasts on Tuesday, which downgraded the growth outlook for 2021 across Europe and underscored a generally poorer performance compared with China and the U.S.
Such diverging fortunes reflect the stringency of lockdowns across the euro zone to contain the coronavirus, as well as a late and stumbling vaccination campaign headwinds that threaten to deepen what already looks likely to be a double-dip recession. Political unease over the future leadership of Germany and a crisis in Italy are compounding the gloom.
Powell, With Year to Run at Fed, Aims to Avoid Past QE Mistake
Bloomberg 1/26/2021 Rich Miller
(Bloomberg) Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell heads into what could be his last year atop the central bank determined not to repeat the mistake he made when he was a neophyte monetary policy maker seven years ago.
Then a Fed governor, Powell was among those leading the charge to scale back the central bank’s quantitative-easing program a stance that led to the economically debilitating and market-wrenching taper tantrum of 2013.
Powell, whose four-year term as chair ends in February 2022, is likely to sound more cautious this week about curbing the Fed’s massive asset purchases even though the economic outlook has brightened further thanks to an expected big budgetary boost from President Joe Biden.
Central bank’s multiple goals make future steps unpredictable
General Economy As Nigeria Faces Rising Debt In 2020
Nigeria’s central bank has analysts guessing about its interest-rate path this year, underscoring the distortions that are stoking inflation while output is languishing in Africa’s largest economy.
All but two of the 18 economists and investors surveyed by Bloomberg forecast the central bank will keep its monetary policy rate steady at 11.5% on Tuesday. However, the outlook for the rest of the year is far less certain.
Of the 18 respondents, 11 said the central bank will raise the key rate rate this year, with forecasts for tightening ranging from 100 basis points to 350 basis points. The rest project policy makers will hold or slash borrowing costs, with one predicting a 400 basis-point reduction.