Saudi Arabia Faces Another “Very Scary Moment” As Economy, FX Regime Face Crude Reality
“They are working for their market share, not for the price,” Kazakh Prime Minister Karim Massimov told Bloomberg on Saturday, during the same interview in which he predicted that sooner or later, dollar pegs in Saudi Arabia and the UAE would have to be abandoned.
The Saudis are essentially betting that their FX reserves all large enough to allow the Kingdom to ride out the self inflicted pain from persistently low crude prices on the way to bankrupting the US shale space. But the battle for market share comes at a cost, especially when ultra easy monetary policy in the US has served to kept capital markets open to heavily indebted drillers, allowing otherwise insolvent producers to remain in business longer than they otherwise would. It is, as we’ve noted before, afight between the Saudis and the Fed.
In the midst of it all, the petrodollar has died a rather swift if quiet death and as we documented on Saturday, the demise of the system that has served to underwrite decades of dollar dominance has left emerging markets in no position to defend themselves in the face of China’s move to devalue the yuan. With Kazakhstan’s decision to float the tenge, we are beginning to see the post-petrodollar world (or, the “new era” as Karim Massimov calls it) take shape.
Over the weeks, months, and years ahead we’ll begin to understand more about the fallout and nowhere is it likely to be more apparent than in Saudi Arabia where widening fiscal and current account deficits have forced the Saudis to tap the bond market to mitigate the FX drawdown that’s fueling speculation about the viability of the dollar peg. Here’s Bloomberg on why the current situation mirrors a “very scary moment” in Saudi Arabia’s history.
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