A Paradox Worth Understanding In 2025, Israel’s tech sector generated $111 billion in capital deals representing nearly four times the previous year’s total and surpassing the 2021 record. Foreign direct investment held at $16.6 billion through active regional conflict. The shekel remained stable. The country’s 5-year sovereign CDS spread fell 82 basis points from its […]
Five Trillion Dollars, Four Different Strategies In 2025, Gulf sovereign wealth funds collectively managed approximately $5 trillion in assets. They accounted for 43 percent of all global sovereign wealth fund investment activity that year, deploying capital across 324 transactions worth $180.3 billion globally. They lead deals in technology, real estate, sports, infrastructure, and private equity
A 41 Percent Number Worth Examining In March 2026, the share of Saudi oil transactions settled in Chinese yuan reached 41 percent. That same month, two major Saudi state-owned banks joined CIPS, China’s cross-border payment system. Total CIPS transactions reached $214 billion in March 2026, a 50 percent increase from February and triple the level
The Most Ambitious Economic Plan of the Modern Middle East In April 2016, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced Saudi Arabia’s most ambitious economic transformation in the kingdom’s history. Vision 2030 would diversify the economy away from oil, build new cities from scratch, attract massive foreign investment, modernize society, and position the country as a
A Chokepoint in Real Time Before February 2026, approximately 3,000 vessels passed through the Strait of Hormuz each month. The traffic moved roughly 20 million barrels of oil per day and about 20 percent of the world’s liquefied natural gas. The strait was busy, predictable, and largely invisible to anyone outside the shipping and energy
The Gap Between Sanctions and Reality In February 2025, President Trump signed National Security Presidential Memorandum-2. The directive imposed “maximum pressure” on Iran with a stated goal of driving the country’s oil exports to zero. In September 2025, Iran exported an estimated 2.13 million barrels of oil per day representing the highest monthly total of
A Tanker Called Panda In January 2025, the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control added a Vietnam-flagged crude oil tanker called Panda to its Specially Designated Nationals list. The vessel had been making regular port calls at Russian terminals where oil consistently traded above the G7 price cap of $60 per barrel. The Panda
In April 2022, two months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the International Monetary Fund forecast that the Russian economy would contract by 8.5 percent that year. The Bank of Russia braced for a 10 percent decline. Western officials predicted economic collapse, currency crisis, and forced policy reversal. None of those predictions came close to reality.
Two Wrong Stories About BRICS Most of what is written about BRICS is wrong in one of two directions. The first wrong story comes from the alliance’s supporters and the financial press that covers them sympathetically. In this telling, BRICS is rapidly building a parallel financial system, the dollar is collapsing, a new BRICS currency
What an Earnings Report Is Trying to Do An earnings report is a piece of financial communication. That sentence sounds neutral, but it is the most important thing to understand before opening one. The numbers in an earnings report are real. They are audited, regulated, and subject to legal liability if they are wrong. But
