How to read the outlook for Kuwait and its banking sector? Positive: vast oil wealth, managed, in large part, by one of the world’s most respected sovereign wealth funds. Negative: collapsed oil prices and a dramatically increased break-even cost for the budget, creating a burden on planned spending.
Positive: a sense of progress, at long last, on Kuwait’s much-heralded mega-projects. Negative: familiar problems of inertia and bureaucracy preventing more getting underway.
Positive: the creation of a capital markets regulator and grand ambitions of building a financial hub. Negative: plenty else that needs fixing and modernizing in financial markets, with a real prospect of being left behind if progress is not made swiftly.
Kuwait is one of the largest losers from the oil price decline, because a very large part of their GDP is oil. They do have a lot of foreign reserves, but not that high compared to other oil producers Raphie Hayat, Rabobank |
It is resplendently self-evident that oil exporters suffer in an era of low oil prices, but what is sometimes lost is the degree of variance between those exporters – especially individual Gulf states – and their particular vulnerabilities. Kuwait, for example, derives 84.7%
