Dollar losses to continue during next 2 years: National Bank of Kuwait exec

RIYADH: The dollar price has become a safe haven since the start of the pandemic, head of the National Bank of Kuwait’s (NBK) Treasury Sales and Services Department, Nafe Alabhool, told Al Arabiya on Tuesday.

Alabhool said that the current period was witnessing dollar fluctuations, but the price of the dollar would decrease in parallel with the economic recovery, the opening of markets and exit from safe havens within the next year or two.

On the US stimulus packages, Alabhool said that the current financial package was worth $1.9 trillion, reaching directly to the citizen and helping to accelerate the distribution of vaccines, which assisted in opening the economy and markets and creating demand for goods, and with no supply parallel to demand, prices would rise.

Alabhool said that the Federal Reserve had stated that it would not raise interest rates to fight commodity prices and high inflation, believing it to be a temporary increase, adding that long-term high growth was always accompanied by an increase in inflation.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund (PIF), has become an anchor investor in a new $300 million Shariah credit fund launched by NBK Capital Partners (NBKCP), a subsidiary of Kuwait’s biggest bank.

The fund plans to make 10 to 12 investments of between $15 million and $50 million over the next eight years, Yaser Moustafa, senior managing director of NBKCP, told Arab News on Tuesday.

Moustafa said that the stake in the fund was a healthy nine-figure commitment.

Asked about other investors in the fund, Moustafa said: “I can only say it will be a US family office making the first private investment in the region, as well as other regional institutions.”