Global Investing

If the pure pursuit of greed is no longer good in the post-crisis world, what defines the new “good”?

That’s when you start to consider “Impact Investing”, a type of investment that pursues measurable social and environmental impacts alongside a financial return.  According to a report prepared for the Rockefeller Foundation, approximately 2,200 impact investments worth $4.4 billion were made in 2011.

But those who may be ideally placed to pursue Impact Investing are still largely absent from the exercise — sovereign wealth funds from the Persian Gulf, according to a recent paper published by academics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.

Authors Asim Ali and Shatha Al-Aswad at Tufts’ Sovereign Wealth Fund Initiative argue that Persian Gulf states can deploy their SWFs in impact investing, via Islamic finance, to help develop their economies.

Islamic finance, with its focus on moral and social objectives, and specifically Sovereign Wealth Funds, as long-term investors, are ideally positioned to pursue impact investing… to foster social impact and economic development in the broader economy.

Bahrain’s civil unrest — which had a one-year anniversary this week — has taken a toll on the local economy and left a deep scar on the Gulf state’s aspiration to become an international financial hub.

A new paper from the Sovereign Wealth Fund Initiative, a research programme at Center for Emerging Market Enterprises (CEME) at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, examines how the political instability of 2011 is threatening Bahrain’s efforts in the past 30 years to diversify its economy and develop the financial centre.

Asim Ali from University of Western Ontario and Shatha Al-Aswad, assistant vice president at State Street, argue in the paper that even before the revolt, Bahrain lagged in building the foundations of a truly international hub in the face of competition from Dubai and Qatar.

Just when investors were settling down to lock in a few of the year’s profits and put their feet up for the end of the year holidays, a black swan has come waddling out of the desert to put everything on edge.

The unwelcome cygnus atratus came in the form of Gulf emirate Dubai telling creditors of Dubai World and property group Nakheel that debt repayments would be delayed.  Fears of contagion spread widely, hitting world stocks, lifting the dollar out of its basement and driving demand for European debt so much that a roughly 6-month trading range for futures was breached.

It all may settle down soon. Dubai says the problem does not apply to its big international ports group.  Meanwhile, the emirate is a pretty leveraged place, but fellow emirates and neighbouring countries such as Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Saudi Arabia are pretty flush with cash. They could even step in to help as a matter of solidarity.

By Jason Benham

It’s the property face of the Gulf’s business and tourist hub and the developer of palm-shaped islands visible from space – so Dubai will simply not allow property firm Nakheel to default on its huge $3.5 billion Islamic bonds which mature in December.

Just think of the bad publicity it would bring to the region, and there’s already been plenty of that. Another kick in the teeth is certainly not what Dubai needs. Plenty of critics have joined the ‘bash Dubai” bandwagon and several more are set to join the ranks at some stage. 

But any default would mark a failure for Dubai World, the state-owned conglomerate, and a castrophe for Dubai’s government, which has ploughed billions of dollars over recent years into making Dubai what it is today.