Jakk Consultancy

August Third Week Newsletter of World and GCC Business and Finance News – Issue #18

Dr. Atie J. El Mouallem – Observing Clientelism through the lens of Political Philosophyatiejelmouallem.com

Highlights:

– Political philosophy asks questions that we must ask ourselves as citizens of a democracy to be responsible participants in our shared governance, questions such as how society should best be structured to enable people to live prosperous lives.

– It is proved that clientelism has a negative impact on development outcomes, with increases in clientelism leading to lower development outcomes

– In his paper Clientelism, Cronyism, and Job Creation in Lebanon, the author Ishac Diwan concludes that sectors with more politically connected firms (PCF) create fewer jobs than similar sectors with no PCF.

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Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Capital partners with BlackRock over private equity fund – GCC Business Newswww.gccbusinessnews.com

Highlights:

– The partnership between Mubadala Capital and BlackRock was formed in line with the final close of BlackRock’s $3 billion Secondaries and Liquidity Solutions (SLS) strategy, which is among the largest fundraises for an inaugural private equity secondaries strategy globally to date.

– Mubadala Capital manages $9 billion of assets in third-party managed funds across its private equity, public equities, venture capital and Brazil businesses, and is the first sovereign wealth fund to manage third-party capital on behalf of other institutional investors.

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Living at AlJurf

Find Out More About Living at AlJurf

AlJurf Gardens harnesses nature’s raw beauty and combines it with refined heritage-inspired architecture and contemporary design to present a sanctuary of wellness and calm.

Throughout the villa spaces, the refined and controlled raw beauty of nature is repeated in different scales, to showcase its exquisiteness across every typology of homes, gardens and courtyards.

Learn more

How Dubai’s luxury property segment is defying all odds

Highlights:

– Looking at super-prime properties, there were 22 homes worth Dhs35m or more sold in the first five months of this year, a volume not witnessed since 2015.

– Palm Jumeirah has been a hotbed of activity, and some of the best frond villas have been disappearing off the market with remarkable speed.

– It is predicted that property prices will rise for the first time in six years, which is a shift that we had expected to happen last year before global circumstances changed.

– In April, 3 per cent of the Dhs10.97bn in sales recorded in Dubai’s property market were at a price point of Dhs10m or higher.

– These past six months have been filled with superlatives in Dubai’s luxury property market, from incredible new properties coming on the market to record-shattering transactions.

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Saudi Arabia’s Social Revolution Arrives at Riyadh Dining Tableswww.bloomberg.com

Highlights:

– A social revolution that promotes going out to concerts and movies and allows gender mixing is now playing out at the dining table in Riyadh, albeit without alcohol.

– The city was used to Lebanese and the occasional Italian fare complemented by “Saudi champagne”—fizzy water and apple juice. It’s now an array of colourful mocktails and imported meats, pomegranate studded cakes and speciality coffees. There’s even briskets and babkas.

– Burke’s second restaurant is the latest addition to a wide variety of eateries at The Zone, a large walkway off a busy Riyadh highway with a dancing fountain. The menu includes baby octopus, Mediterranean branzino and lamb chops.

– And it’s not just new food, but who is serving it. Women now work as hostesses, waitresses and baristas, a huge change from the day’s restaurants were required to post a sign saying female diners were not allowed in without a male guardian.

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Robin Grove of CARS Gets Your Collectible Car Delivered on Time – Bloombergwww.bloomberg.com

Highlights:

– Bugatti, Koenigsegg, McLaren, Pagani, and Rivian trust Robin Grove to move their multimillion-dollar wares; so do RM Sotheby’s, European banking billionaires, and the Kuwaiti royal family.

– Her headquarters is temperature-controlled with extensive security cameras and closed-circuit TV running 24/7. It holds dozens of cars triple-covered. Under wraps, for those eagle-eyed enough to recognize their shape: a $31 million Ferrari, a $10 million Jaguar D-Type, a few $13 million Zagatos, a $35 million Alfa Romeo, and a $2 million Koenigsegg Regera, among others.

– She also has offices in Amsterdam, Dubai, London, and, soon, Miami.

– Rates range from around $10,000 to get a short-wheelbase Porsche 911 to LA from, say, Amsterdam. To move a Bizzarrini from London to Carmel can run $40,000 because it’ll need to be inside its own wooden crate. It can cost as much as $67,000 to air freight, say, a Ferrari F40 into LA from Hong Kong.

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Hackers Return Funds From Likely Record DeFi Crypto Attack – Bloomberg

Highlights:

– The hackers also posted a Q&A online, explaining motivations for the attack as “for fun :).” The online pirates said they took the funds “to keep it safe” after spotting a bug in the computer code.

– Hackers returned about half of the $610 million or so they pilfered Tuesday in what was likely one of the biggest cryptocurrency thefts on record in the burgeoning Defi sector.

– This demonstrates that even if you can steal crypto-assets, laundering them and cashing out is extremely difficult, due to the transparency of the blockchain and the use of blockchain analytics,” Robinson said. “In this case, the hacker concluded that the safest option was just to return the stolen assets.”

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Inequality Eased During the Pandemic, But for How Long? – Bloomberg

Highlights:

– Pandemics are one of the “Four Horsemen” of economic equalization described by historian Walter Scheidel in his acclaimed 2017 book, “The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century” (the other three being war, revolution and state collapse).

– Nobel-prize-winning economist Angus Deaton found that economic inequality among countries had decreased during the pandemic, although this didn’t hold on a population-weighted basis because the economy of India, the largest country in the bottom half of the world’s income distribution (it’s “lower-middle-income,” according to the World Bank), had suffered greatly even before this year’s rise of the Delta variant.

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Letter Requesting Donation for School

Our school “Lady of the Tower School for the Sisters of the Holy Family” is located in Bekaa- Lebanon in the district of Deir El Ahmar. atiejelmouallem.com

Its ultimate goal is our children’s spiritual and educational lives.

From 1932 till now, our school still taking care of poor children, but due to the economic circumstances in Lebanon in general, and in our school in particular, we require your generous attention in the form of donations. 

Your donation and help can bring a smile to thousands of faces by helping them to achieve a good life and to continue their learning in our school.

Learn more.

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