Gulf Sovereign Wealth Funds Defy Oil Price Slump With $56 Billion Spending Spree

The sovereign wealth funds of Gulf petrostates continue to be the top state investors globally despite weaker oil prices this year. The share of sovereign wealth fund investments from the Middle East and North Africa in the global total was 40% for the first nine months of the year, cementing the funds’ leadership.

Data from Global SWF, a sovereign investment researcher, showed that funds from the Middle East spent a combined $56.3 billion in the nine-month period, the Financial Times reported today. This amount was similar to the investments made by the same funds a year earlier, even though oil prices have declined considerably in the meantime.

In the first nine months of 2024, Brent crude was trading above $80 per barrel. This year, it has slipped below $70 per barrel for most of the first nine months. This led to expectations that sovereign wealth fund investment would shrink, but it has not, proving that the financial positions of the Gulf economies were stronger than assumed.

“Four out of the six GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] countries are still in surplus,” the founder of Global SWF told the Financial Times. “Money is still flowing to the sovereign wealth funds, they have to put it to work . . . that is one of the reasons that they keep being quite aggressive in the marketplace,” Diego Lopez also said.

Among the Gulf sovereign wealth funds, Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala, though not strictly a sovereign wealth fund, was the most active investor, with a total of $17.4 billion spent between January and September. The emirate’s actual sovereign wealth fund—the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority—followed, with $9.6 billion in investments made over the first nine months of the year. The top three was completed by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, the Qatar Investment Authority, which spent $7.6 billion in the period.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

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