Category: Abdul Aziz
AA: Why so long since the last time? KH: I was in Montreal for a conference last week, landed in time for the coldest temperature in years. But the snow and the ice on the trees were pretty. Since I got back, it seems that the political climate is warming up in France. The Greeks […]
AA: I told you Obama is a hawk. Look at his security team. No wonder the left can’t figure out what is happening. That’s why they are calling him an Uncle Tom. KH: Well, I can see that some could be worried that this is a recycling of the same old Washington elite. Who speaks […]
KH: You’re looking glummer than usual. What is it? Oil in the $50s? AA: No, we can hardly expect anything else with the world economy heading for the next Great Deflation, if it isn’t already there. I just spent a week in Riyadh. You know, the world looks different from there — four or five […]
KH: Where have you been? I wanted to talk about Obama’s victory. AA: India, Brazil and South Africa. You’ve heard of IBSA? We are looking to invest in South-South economic co-operation. I’ll tell you about it some time. So why are you so keen on a US election post-mortem? KH: Well, I wanted to tell […]
KH: Well, this has been a big week for relations between Britain and the Gulf states. I see that Gordon Brown, self-appointed saviour of the world economy, has made a lightning visit to Riyadh to persuade you lot to bail out the IMF. He calls it a “Global crisis fund”, sounds like the begging bowl […]
KH: I see that OPEC are going to cut oil output by 1.5 billion dollars a day from November 1st. AA: Well, now we know that the world economy is going through a deep deflation, it would be crazy to do otherwise. I hope you noticed that we didn’t propose any cuts when the oil […]
KH: Well, Abdul, what’s your position on these crazy markets? AA: I’m with Warren Buffet. I love that guy. Did you see his oped piece in the New York Times today, ‘Buy American. I am‘? It’s not just that I agree with his prediction that US stocks are going to bounce back soon, he has […]
KH: Ed points out that the crisis is essentially one of debt deflation. Another way of saying this perhaps is that the world is deleveraging fast. He wants us to acknowledge that there are winners and losers in a deflation, just as there are in inflation. AA: That reminds me of Keynes’s great piece in […]
These reports are edited versions of exchanges held via Skype, email and face-to-face, taken from a conversation that began in early 2007. Abdul Aziz (not his real name) is a minor Saudi royal with a degree in economics from a Midwestern university who now lives in London where he manages some of his immediate family’s […]
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