Foreign countries look to the Middle East for money during global instability

March 09, 2023

As oil prices made a roaring comeback in the last two years, the Gulf’s public wealth funds went on a spending spree. The top five regional funds in terms of spending in the last year — Abu Dhabi’s ADIA, ADQ and Mubadala, Saudi Arabia’s PIF and Qatar’s QIA — deployed a combined total of more than $73 billion in 2022 alone, according to sovereign wealth fund tracker Global SWF.  Five out of the ten most active investors hail from the Middle East,” and ADIA is currently the “world’s largest allocator to hedge funds,” Global SWF’s 2023 report wrote. So, it’s an understatement to say that foreign demand is high. One investment fund manager in the UAE noted, “A lot of places in the world are low on capital – Western institutional funds are kind of hamstrung. And this region has a lot of capital.” In fact, money from the GCC funds still overwhelmingly goes to developed markets, in particular the U.S. and Europe.

Read the original article in CNBC: Amid a global downturn, the finance world is chasing Middle Eastern money