Kuwait faces up to a “massive destruction of wealth” | Beyond Brics | FT.com

Kuwait may be one of the richest countries in the world, but a large swathe of its financial sector is a basket case that would rival the worst of Wall Street.

Encouraged by cheap debt, petrodollars and an insatiable appetite for sometimes bizarre investments, Kuwait’s 100 investment companies swelled their assets to more than $50bn in 2007, but the sector imploded spectacularly after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy.

In a report published today, Markaz - one of the few well-run investment companies - estimated the scale of the resulting “massive destruction of wealth”: