Saudi Arabia flexes its muscle to project political and financial clout
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) will be one the world’s fastest-growing economy in 2022, outperforming the struggling G7 countries as well as all other G20 economies.
The huge petrodollar windfall comes as Riyadh is pushing ahead with an ambitiou plan to diversify its economy and move away from oil and gas. This year would be the kingdom’s fastest economic growth since 2011. While in 2022 Saudi Arabia will grow at 8%, next year, Saudi Arabian real GDP growth is expected to be around 5,5 %. The account balance will register a surplus of at least US$163bn (up from US$44bn in 2021), allowing the Kingdom to rebuild its international reserves to approximately $500 billion. Saudi Aramco, the Kingdom controlled oil company registered profit of USD 48.4 billion (up 90% from 2021) for the second quarter of 2022. Bloomberg reported that this was “the biggest quarterly adjusted profit of any listed company.”
A large portion of Saudi’s national wealth is managed by the Public Investment Fund (PIF), the sixth largest global Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) with total assets of $ 607 billions. Here below is the table with the top ten SWF, 4 of which are owned by crude oil and natural gas rich Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar. These 4 SWF combined manage 2,5 US$ trillion, and we should expect them to play…
