The default in Dubai is not the beginning of Financial Meltdown 2. Don’t look for dominoes here. Yes, it does raise serious questions about the vast debt-overhang in emerging economies–particularly East Europe. But, this is not a “sovereign default” in the strict sense, nor is there any great risk of contagion. Oil-rich Abu Dhabi...
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Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the kingdom’s former ambassador to the United States, is reportedly under house arrest over a conspiracy against the monarch. Saad al-Faqih, head of the opposition group Islamic Reform Movement, told Arab-language TV al-Alam that Prince Bandar has been disappeared and the media has published no word from the ex-diplomat’s...
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It is fitting that today’s deadline for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq’s cities coincides with a meeting in Baghdad to auction off some of the country’s largest oil fields to companies such as ExxonMobil, Chevron and British Petroleum. It is a reminder of the real motives for the 2003 invasion and in...
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At a hearing in Washington today, the federal Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan is releasing a 111-page report that represents its “initial investigations of the nation’s heavy reliance on contractors.” According to a release on the hearing: More than 240,000 contractor employees, about 80 percent of them foreign nationals, are working...
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Should terrorists be treated with open arms and an open heart? Robert Lacey, best-selling author and journalist investigates the surprising success of Saudi Arabia’s approach to dealing with terrorists and extremists – without torture or water-boarding. Given extraordinary access to the Saudi Arabian Interior Ministry and its practices, Lacey visits terrorist rehabilitation camps that...
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It is payback time for Rothschild in Dubai. The 200-year-old banking house, perhaps the bluest of the blue bloods of the world’s financial dynasties, has always prided itself on the strength of its relationships, especially with governments and global power brokers. Now, after years of cultivating Dubai corporations with advice and assistance, it has...
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Bill Moyers on Big Oil and Iraq “Oh no, they told us, Iraq isn’t a war about oil. That’s cynical and simplistic, they said. It’s about terror and al Qaeda and toppling a dictator and spreading democracy and protecting ourselves from WMD. But one by one, these concocted rationales went up in smoke, fire,...
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