Things are looking up in Qatar; not only the skyscrapers rising from its desert sands. Index provider MSCI recently announced it would reclassify Qatar from frontier market to emerging market status.

The most significant potential benefit of this reclassification could be the dose of added confidence it will give investors.

I think Qatar’s future looks very bright for a number of reasons.

For ease of doing business, Qatar is one of the best in the region.

1.  The World Bank’s 2014-2015 Global Competitiveness index ranks it 16th among 189 countries in this regard. Qatar is a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), along with Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, a grouping which I believe could surprise on the upside in terms of growth rates in the years ahead.

2. The IMF said growth in the six-nation Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) states is projected to remain strong at an average 4.5% in 2014 and 2015.

3.  Qatar and the UAE are among the three most attractive markets in the world for investment in infrastructure, according to a new report by EC Harris, the global built asset consultancy firm.
Qatar was ranked second and the UAE third globally for their strong business environment, healthy pipeline of development work and growing economic, making them attractive countries for investors including pension funds and banks. The findings, which come from the second Global Infrastructure Investment Index which ranks 41 countries by their attractiveness to investors in infrastructure, also revealed that Saudi Arabia was placed 12th.

4. Tax rates are generally low in the GCC, and Qatar is a standout in this regard. In Qatar, income tax is zero and profits are taxed at zero which makes things very attractive not only for individuals but for companies. Each of these countries pegs its currency to the US dollar except Kuwait, which pegs to a basket or group of currencies, so the impact of the US Federal Reserve’s slowing or ending of its longstanding asset-purchasing program on these currencies should be more muted than in some other emerging markets.

5.  The country’s control of an estimated 14 per cent of the world’s known reserves of natural gas has bought it a seat at the very highest levels in global diplomacy.

6. Qatar has also set its sights on becoming a global center for Islamic finance, which features Shariah-compliant investment vehicles. I think this development is only in its infancy, as there is much interest in these products globally.

7.  Last, despite the state’s uncomfortable embrace of extremist movements in the Middle East, its love of Western trophy assets remains undiminished. Late summer, it swooped upon the Paris-based Le Grand hotel, paying Britain’s InterContinental Hotel group £264million. Constellation Holdings, part of Qatar Holdings, bought the InterContinental in Park Lane for £400million last year.

The best known symbol of its power and influence in London is the Harrods department store, bought from the Egyptian Al-Fayed family in May 2010 for £1.5billion.

That is just the tip of an iceberg of Qatari funds flowing into London. The London Stock Exchange is 15 per cent owned by the Qatari Investment Authority. Qatar Holdings is a 26 per cent shareholder in the £6billion Sainsbury’s grocery group and is seen as a potential future owner.

Qatari investors also have been hugely active in British property. At the height of the financial crisis Qatar stepped in to bail out the Shard in the City of London. It partnered with Delancey estates in redeveloping the Olympic Park at Stratford and financed the Candy Brothers in developing One Hyde Park at Knightsbridge.

Qatari investors also own the Chelsea Barracks site in West London and a huge property development off Oxford Street in conjunction with Land Securities.

Although their property speculations have aroused some hackles and their attempts to win control of three prestigious London hotels, Claridges, the Connaught and the Berkeley has brought them head to head with the Barclay Brothers, owners of the Daily Telegraph group…. they haven’t slowed down a bit.

However controversial this tiny but powerful country and astute investors can be, I think it should see even more visitors, and investors, as it rises in importance on the global stage in the years to come.

Share your thoughts…

Build your network before you need it. I crack up at the people who come to me for advice on how to build a “master network” because they need a job now, I tell them it’s useless. People can tell the difference between desperation and an earnest attempt to create a relationship. Bottom Line: Anticipate the worst, keep building the right relationship from the start and then strike when needed. Any other exercise is just an exercise in futility.

Be a real interesting “Renaissance “ man . I am fully aware of the fact that perception drives reality and that we are all, in some sense, “brands”. But the cornerstone of my philosophy is really content. Being known is one thing, but being known for content is something else entirely — and much better. You have to have something to say to be interesting to people. If not, there is nothing that really differentiates you from the crowd. Once your pitch is perfected, getting attention is never a problem. Journalists are powerful (the right exposure can make a company), needy (they’re always looking for a story), and relatively unknown (few have achieved enough celebrity to make them inaccessible)…Fame sells.

Continue Reading: Becoming The Master “Mover And Shaker” You Want To Be

Ziad K Abdelnour, President and CEO of Blackhawk partners, a New York private equity firm which has been involved in transactions totalling over $10billion.

Ziad K Abdelnour describes business as war and discusses the importance of gathering intelligence to set you apart from the competition. He also stresses the importance of dealing with life’s harsh realities in order to become a killer shark entrepreneur.

Ziad K Abdelnour describes business as war and discusses the importance of gathering intelligence to set you apart from the competition. He also stresses the importance of dealing with life’s harsh realities in order to become a killer shark entrepreneur.

Watch: The Entre Era Podcast Ziad K Abdelnour : Business Is War

Thank You,

I am afraid America makes less sense every day.

Little children are randomly slaughtered in their schoolrooms. Predator drones roam the skies over foreign countries exterminating bad guys, along with innocent women and children (collateral damage when it occurs in a foreign country). Drugged up mentally ill kids with no hope and no future live lives of secluded quiet desperation until they snap. Ignorant, government educated, welfare dependent drones with no self respect or respect for others, assault, kill and rob within their government created urban ghettoes. Sociopaths who committed the largest financial crime in world history walk free and continue to occupy executive suites in luxury office towers in downtown NYC, collecting millions in bonuses as compensation for crushing the American middle class. Academics, whose theories have been thoroughly disproven, continue to steer our economy into an iceberg while accelerating the money printing and debt issuance that will sink our ship of state. Corrupt, bought off politicians pander to the lowest common denominator as their votes are only dependent upon who contributed the most to their election campaigns, which never end.

Delusional, materialistic, narcissistic, math challenged consumers (formerly known as citizens – live for today, enslave themselves in debt, vote themselves more entitlements, and care not for future generations.

Read More: Ziad K Abdelnour

Remember the infamous quote of villain financier Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street…back in 1987?

“I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them! The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed–for lack of a better word–is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms–greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge–has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed–you mark my words–will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA”.

So what do you make of it? Is greed good?

I guess as with any question like this, we need to start with the word “good.”

It is a fault of our language that “good” is most often used in an unqualified way. This is a symptom of our natural preference for dualistic thought. So what does unqualified ‘good’ mean?

With our Firm’s recent signing of a 200 Million Euros Partnership Agreement to Fund & Facilitate the Purchase of 25 Vessels – http://www.pr.com/press-release/582221. I am frequently asked by partners and observers alike why a Greek company as a platform for our roll-up and why a particular interest in the shipping industry.

Hopefully this will shed some more light as to how we at Blackhawk operate.

1. The rationale?

Blackhawk is first and foremost a “physical commodities trading house” and second a “family office private equity shop”. What better business model to adopt than building a vertically integrated operation that controls the whole commodities trading food chain from logistics to trading and investing all under one roof? This partnership with Golden Sea Ways accomplishes all of that and more and we at Blackhawk cannot be more excited about it.

Read More: Why Greek Shipping? World’s Foremost Shipping Superpower

Thank you,

Having been on Wall Street for around three decades now, I am often asked – mostly by foreign investors-, what’s so special about Wall Street that gets people’s attention the world over and what are the facts from the fiction when it comes to this “Mecca of Finance”.

Here are some of my personal thoughts.

I guess it all started when the Panic of 1907 occurred and the New York Stock Exchange fell 50% in a year peak to trough, JP Morgan bought stocks and called up a few other Wall Street titans to buy. This prevented a total collapse of the financial system and the US economy.  JP Morgan did this ostensibly to protect the country. But sometimes doing the right thing at the right time is a necessary expense to build your brand and to prove to the government and your critics that you yourself don’t need to be regulated – so you and your tight oligopoly can continue making obscene profits in normal times… I believe this is around the time Wall Street was really shaped- followed by the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 and all other regulatory agencies over the next 20 years.

So what makes Wall Street so powerful and what are the facts from the fiction out there?

Let’s start by the most obvious.

1. Wall Street is important because that’s where the money is. When they asked John Dillinger, a famous bank robber, why he robbed banks, that was his answer.

2. The titans from Wall Street banks have been closely tied to Presidents, Treasury secretaries, finance ministers, CEOs and prime ministers for a long time. So, quite simply, the folks who run Wall Street care about power and they know how to get it. Money is the means Wall Street titans use to accumulate power and they love it. They love having it. Getting more of it. Befriending those who have it, and befriending those connected to the powerful.

3. Money is Wall Street’s currency to get power. When I fundraised for Romney, I spent a lot of time on Park Avenue. All the fundraisers were held there. Well, 90%… Then I got a glimpse of how things worked. These folks all gave a ton of money and did a ton of fundraising. Like, a boatload. So when you’re a leading candidate for President, you go to the wealthiest financier’s homes late at night for meetings, so you can ask them for advice they were going to give you anyway, while they make sure they have continued access to you so they can work those levers of power to their advantage – or at least not let the government get in their way.

4. Besides political fundraising, Wall Street does tons of highly relevant tasks and favors to big governments, big companies, big pensions and billionaires. If you’re one of those people, Wall Street can and will get you the money you need or want, for a fee. That’s if you need a lot of it and you can pay it back -even if you have to print it or confiscate it. Argentina, I’m looking at you.

5. Wall Street knows the folks with the real money who are seeking investments and hedges and speculative positions. Wall Street knows how to transfer all types of risks – currency, market, credit, interest rate, company, litigation and other risks – from those who want to get rid of it to those who are willing to be paid to take it.

6. Wall Street also knows market making and price discovery and efficiency. It will trade and trade and trade money and financial instruments and commodities and lots of other things in its various forms. So, Wall Street is important. And it uses its importance to be powerful.

7. To date, the Secretaries of Treasury have come from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, etc…. When they leave the government, they go back to those elite banks. Summers, Geithner, Rubin, etc… all went to banks or private equity funds when they left government work at some point (Summers was at a fund after leaving Harvard).

8. Certainly everybody’s hands are a little bit dirty when it comes to the global financial crisis. A lot of dumb mistakes were made all around. Some of them were idiosyncratic in nature (you can pinpoint many questionable trades made by both investment banks and hedge funds), and some of the mistakes were systemic in nature (think Fannie and Freddie).  You can easily assign blame to any market participant you want to, but at the end of the day, if you construct a pie chart of all the blame-able people in 2008, my hunch is that hedge funds would make up a very small portion of that pie. The reason is that they do not control public policy and regulations (which play a huge role in bringing about the crisis), nor do hedge funds put on as much risk as other market participants do because they simply do not control that much capital. Fannie, Freddie, pension funds, insurance companies, foreign central banks, investment banks, etc., dwarf the hedge fund industry by many, many orders of magnitude. I think it’s fine go out of your way and blame the 20-something hedge fund trader at Magnetar or Paulson for constructing trades which have a vested interest in seeing the mortgage market fall apart, because there’s something probably morally questionable about that, but understand that they didn’t cause that market collapse because they can’t. And before you say anything: Yes, I am probably biased being a Wall Street financier myself but No, I did not work in the hedge fund industry during the relevant time period.

9. If you think the Hollywood movie “The Wolf of Wall Street” is of any characterization of the real Wall Street, you are delusional. Nothing to do with reality and I frankly expected much better from an overrated Scorsese or a supposedly brilliant De Caprio.  The movie is total fantasy addressed basically to an ignorant public and/or third rate stockbroker wannabees who know squat but think they know it all and are hustling like the movie producer and lead actor to dump their crap to the world… Sorry to spoil your enthusiasm.

10. On the same note, if you think that Wall Street abides by any of the propaganda as per below you are equally delusional. Time for a rude awakening.

• We don’t care about social costs
• We worship the invisible hand
• We don’t care about the environment
• We all go to business schools
• We’re all elitist and are all rich
• We’re all conservatives

I met Hank Paulson very briefly after he left Treasury. I name dropped a current deputy secretary of state I knew he would know from Goldman Sachs. He had a business going, helping big important governments around the world. This meeting led me to a number of similar meetings to the high and mighty which gave me a real glimpse trough luck and fate and hard work of how the financial elite work.

Bottom Line: Consider it like this.  Imagine if all supermarkets, grocers, and other sellers of food closed suddenly.  We need food to survive and function and would shrivel up and die without it.  Now imagine if the major retailers of consumer electronics closed.  The effect would be hugely significant throughout our society, but we would be able to continue on.

To major corporations, Wall Street is the “supermarkets, grocers, and food sellers.”  Wall Street provides them with the lifeblood, money, that they need to continue their operations.  Thus, Wall Street has power over them.

Now that you know who runs America and the world, I strongly suggest to anyone of you wanting to build a career in any industry to spend some time there – even a stint-. It is an experience second to none which will benefit you in the long run while truly learning how the “money world” works.

Share your thoughts…