Earlier today, Governor Yasir Al-Rümayyân announced that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund (PIF) plans to cut its overseas investments by about a third, as the Kingdom adopts a resolutely “developmentalist” investment policy aiming to “leapfrog right into the fifth industrial revolution” (FIR) and thus play a central role in the “Age of Geoeconomics” (Cold War 2).
Some members of the “Wall Street and Silicon Valley royalty” (to use the words of Fortune magazine) which flew to Riyadh yesterday to attend Saudi Arabia’s Future Investment Initiative (FII) summit may be surprised by the Kingdom’s new stance. They shouldn’t.
HRH Mohammed bin Salman is simply signaling to the rest of the world that the rising Western Asian and Pan-Arab power will “no longer satisfy itself with the provision of excess capital to Wall Street and City of London bankers” … “going forward, the lion’s share of Saudi assets will be focused solely on domestic investments in tech, deep tech, aviation, advanced semiconductor foundries, gene therapy, agro-industry and sophisticated medical equipment etc. This is happening here and now” (EU ASEAN Centre).
The author of this article, alongside Norm Anderson in the United States and the Hon. Nick Sherry in the Asia-Pacific area, was the first to predict that, to succeed, the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 plan would eventually need to “fast-track and expand massively industrial investments in its own backyard, reorienting a larger share of national wealth into purely domestic endeavors in tech, high tech and infrastructure” (The Firm of the Future).
We’re republishing our seminal research primer titled “Notes from Washington, Riyadh and Beijing”
Other papers on the ‘Saudi miracle’, originally published in Classical Arabic, Chinese and French etc. will also be republished in English in the coming days