Abstract In 1979 Iraq was a net creditor to the world, due to its large oil reserves and lack of external debt. Fifteen years later, its government debt-to-GDP was over 1,000%. At the time of the U.S. invasion in 2003, Iraq was saddled with around $130 billion in external debt that needed to be restructured. How does a country incur so much debt, so fast, and how does it ge
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1. Introduction [1] The purpose of this note is to shed light, and comment, on two views expressed recently in relation to the appreciation of the Iraq Dinar (IQD) in 2006-2008. Muhammad Tawfiq Alawi (henceforth M. Alawi), former minister of communications in Iraq, gave a talk on December 13, 2019 in Washington D.C. to an Iraqi audience, in which he
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Abstract The article addresses the subject through four topics: the first topic offers an empirical examination of the performance of the banking sector during the period 2010–15. It also diagnoses the sector’s weaknesses and attributes such weaknesses to their inherited causes, be it legal, environmental, managerial or regulatory issues of the banking industry. The analysis
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AFC is overweight on Iraq’s financial stocks Hong Kong-based fund management company Asia Frontier Capital (AFC) has been actively tracking Iraqi equities since June 2015 when they launched the AFC Iraq Fund. As of January 2017, the fund is overweight the financial sector which commands a good 58.1% portfolio allocation. Consumer staples stand second with a 23.3% weighting.
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The Kurdistan Regional Government, which oversees the semi-autonomous region of northern Iraq, has picked Goldman Sachs International and Deutsche Bank AG for a potential bond sale as it seeks greater independence from Baghdad. The two banks will “organize a series of meetings with international fixed-income investors in London, with a view to a potential transaction in th
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