Zawya Express

Dubai's Gold and Commodities Exchange is looking to broaden its appeal to financial institutions by creating new "mini-gold' contracts that banks could offer to retail investors and by developing its foreign exchange product range by offering more spot market contracts, its CEO has told Zawya.

The exchange, which had its busiest year on record in 2018, with the number of contracts exchanged by participants increasing by 28 percent to 22.26 million, benefitted from the greater volatility that took place in global markets last year.

Cryptocurrency exchange start-ups in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region are hopeful that the region’s financial authorities will eventually find ways to regulate trading in crypto asset businesses, the founders of two such entities have said.

In the GCC region, very few markets have formally indicated a desire to regulate cryptocurrency trading, with Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) being an exception. It launched a Crypto Asset Regulatory Framework in June last year to provide a set of rules governing spot trading of crypto assets by exchanges, custodians and other intermediaries.

Abu Dhabi state fund Mubadala Investment Company has diversified its portfolio both inside and outside of the United Arab Emirates, but allocated over 80 percent of its investments internationally, its chief executive has said.

“With our size, we cannot concentrate our investments in the UAE. More than 80 percent of our investments is international, because at the end of the day, the economy cannot handle the size of our investments,” Khaldoon Al Mubarak, chief executive officer of Mubadala, said at Milken Institute’s Mena Summit in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday.

Rents and sale prices in Riyadh's residential property market have declined over the past 12 months, and are set to fall further in the year ahead as new supply comes onto the market, according to CBRE.

The company's Riyadh Market Snapshot published on Monday stated that villa sale prices in Saudi Arabia's capital dropped by 4 percent year-on-year in 2018, while apartment prices fell by 3 percent.

The International Monetary Fund’s managing director Christine Lagarde gave two speeches from Dubai this week – one at an Arab finance chiefs' conference focusing on fiscal policy, and the other to the World Government Summit on the importance of the financial inclusion of SMEs into the region’s formal economy.

In the first speech at the opening session of the Arab Fiscal Forum on Saturday, Lagarde said that the Arab region “has yet to fully recover from the global financial crisis and other big economic dislocations over the past decade”, while oil exporting nations, which include most of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, have not fully recovered from the oil price’s decline in 2014, according to a copy of the speech sent to Zawya by email via the IMF.

Saudi Arabia’s entities, including central bank and corporates, were the top issuers of bonds and sukuk among GCC countries for 2018, according to a report by Kuwait Financial Centre ‘Markaz’.

The overall GCC sovereign and corporate issuances were down by 11.7 percent in 2018 to $153.74 billion, in comparison to the amount raised in 2017.