The oil crash is crushing Saudi Arabia’s budget. The anti-Saudi media campaign has, by turns, concentrated on the notion that the Kingdom supports terrorism, and called for amnesty for a young Saudi man condemned to death on terrorism charges and for the release of a British man who has been imprisoned for breaking the law in Saudi Arabia.
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Saudi Arabia’s ministry of finance criticized the move as “reactionary” and not based on its economic fundamentals.
Tens of thousands more jobs are estimated to be linked to the £1.6 billion of United Kingdom arms contracts such as components for machineguns and water cannon, ammunition and tear gas. And does the Western world not see that, from an Eastern cultural perspective, the practice of abandoning one’s elders in old people’s homes-something very accepted in Western countries-for us represents an outrageous violation of basic human rights?
S&P projects that Saudi Arabia’s general government deficit will decline to 10 percent of GDP in 2016, 8 percent in 2017 and 5 percent in 2018.
The Finance Ministry for Saudi Arabia said that it disagreed strongly with the assessment from S&P, and did not agree with how it approached the ratings management in this specific instance.
But Landis does say prices won’t say low forever, with Brent Crude forecast to be in the $60 range next year. While the drop in oil prices has obviously hurt Saudi Arabia, it has hurt its antagonists Iran and Russian Federation even more.
Late past year, OPEC shocked the oil world when it announced that it would not cut production despite falling prices, sending the market into a tailspin.
In short, RBC noted that there have been growing reports of discontent within the royal family since the ascent of King Salman to the throne in January.
Shipments from Iraq’s north by the Kurdistan Regional Government via Ceyhan in Turkey have edged lower, while those by Iraq’s State Oil Marketing Organization have fallen to zero from about 20,000 bpd in September, the survey found. Smaller increases have come from OPEC’s two west African producers, Nigeria and Angola, and from Libya.
“In our view, reconciling intra-family issues around succession could make the kingdom’s policy decisions more challenging and hard to predict …”
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Falling oil prices and continued instability in the Middle East will continue to deplete liquid financial assets in the region’s oil exporters, according to the global Monetary Fund. “The king is not in a stable condition and in reality the son of the king [Mohammed bin Salman] is ruling the kingdom”, the prince said.
