Word: saudi
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...contrast, Saudi Arabia's institutional memory of the boom and bust cycle served it well during what was the kingdom's third great oil boom of the past four decades. After the high prices of the 1970s, Saudi Arabia's economy went through a long-drawn-out slowdown as oil revenues plummeted for most of the 1980s. After a spike when Iraq invaded Kuwait, prices weakened again in the 1990s, even as Saudi struggled to pay off its (large) chunk of the bill for the first Gulf War. At the height of the Asian financial crisis in 1998, oil prices...
...when oil prices started to rise in 2003, Saudi Arabia was ready. For one thing, the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, the country's central bank, had greatly expanded the number of well-trained national staffers. Second, it had at its helm officials who remembered the bad days of low oil revenues. That meant that when the oil gushers were turned up again, money was saved and not aggressively spent as elsewhere in the region. The nation's wealth was also placed in very liquid investments, predominantly U.S. government paper assets, rather than real estate. While other regional investment funds were...
Third, King Abdullah, though often criticized as being too "frugal," has stuck to sensible spending. It is this that has saved Saudi Arabia. Even the ambitious economic cities that were announced at the end of 2005 were private-sector initiatives, not state-financed ones...
Fourth, the banking sector, thanks to its experience during the 1990s, has taken a conservative approach to lending, and remains highly unleveraged. Importantly, real estate in Saudi Arabia did not experience the same bubble that occurred in the country's neighbors; as a result consumers and lenders have been protected...
...death and revenge so often peddled by foreign correspondents. With both an insider's affection and an outsider's perspective, he paints a richer, more subtle portrait of the region through miniprofiles of the people, groups and agencies (big and small) that influence daily Arab life--Hizballah, al-Jazeera, Saudi clerics and an influential Lebanese chef, among others. As a result, stories of the hateful, misogynist policies of the Saudi religious establishment and the dark deeds of the Jordanian secret police are more than balanced out by those of brave, modern reformers. By the book's end, MacFarquhar's hope...