Word: banking
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...Bank robber Cleopatra Sims in] Set It Off. Going to work every day with Jada Pinkett and Kim Elise and Vivica A. Fox, shooting guns and driving cars, was just a lot of fun. Plus, it was kind of controversial because I played a character who was gay. People were like, "You gonna kiss a girl? In a movie?" People were against it, but I knew I could do something special with that role...
...Dabbagh is working to remove other barriers as well and crack the Top 10 on competitiveness lists prepared by the World Economic Forum and the World Bank. Since 2005, SAGIA has been pressing the notoriously sclerotic government bureaucracy to become more investor-friendly, simplify procedures and cut back on paperwork. Dahlia Khalifa, an economist on the World Bank team that produces the Doing Business report, credits Saudi Arabia with "consistent reforms over the past three years...
...result, the kingdom is on the move. On the World Economic Forum's list, it is 27th, up from 35th last year. It sprinted up the World Bank's list, from 67th in 2005 to 16th in 2008, making it the easiest place to do business in the Middle East. In that time, foreign investment in Saudi Arabia has nearly doubled, to $23 billion. "Foreign businesses are looking at us differently," al-Dabbagh boasts. Companies with a long history of working in the kingdom say they've noticed the difference. "The say/do factor has improved significantly," says Nabil Habayeb...
...Saudi Arabia is still some distance from being an investor's mecca. The kingdom ranks a woeful 137th on the World Bank's list when measured by ability to enforce contracts. For many investors, that will be a red flag. Saudi Arabia has also fared poorly on other lists that investors parse: it has slipped to 80th place on Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index for 2008, from 70th in 2005. By that reckoning, Saudi Arabia is one of the most corrupt places in the Middle East...
...global stock-market rout that ate 18% of the Dow, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson was forced to import a plan he once considered practically un-American. Paralleling a program authored by U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, it called for the U.S. government to take partial ownership of nine leading banks and offer to buy pieces of hundreds of others. On Oct. 13, the nine bank bosses, assembled in the Treasury's imposing boardroom, were each handed a piece of paper with the terms: $25 billion of preferred shares each from Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Bank of America...