Dubai-based Mashreq said on Monday it would convert federal government deposits into regulatory capital after similar moves by several UAE banks seeking to improve asset quality as the financial crisis bites.
Banks in the second-largest Arab economy, where former boomtown Dubai is facing a real estate price correction, are looking to shore up their stockpile of capital as loan defaults mount and they take provisions for more bad loans to come.
Banks across the oil-producing Gulf have written down the value of investments and taken provisions against an expected rise in bad loans after the region's economic boom came to an end late last year as oil prices collapsed.
According to respected international lawyer Franklin Lamb a recent CIA report gives the Israeli state 20 years before it collapses. Apparently members of the US Senate Intelligence Committee have seen the report which argues that a two-state solution is no longer realistic and that a one-state solution is the only viable democratic option. It predicts:
ReplyDelete"an inexorable movement away from a two-state to a one-state solution, as the most viable model based on democratic principles of full equality that sheds the looming specter of colonial Apartheid while allowing for the return of the 1947/1948 and 1967 refugees. The latter being the precondition for sustainable peace in the region."
According to Lamb the CIA refers to the rapid and unexpected downfall of Apartheid South Africa (unexpected by the CIA that is which was of course a supporter of the racist regime, with the US government refusing to support sanctions, along with Thatcher's Britain) and of the Soviet Union.
http://gazasolidarity.blogspot.com/2009/03/cia-predicts-collapse-of-israeli-state.html