Saudi Arabia targets $600b Sovereign Wealth Fund

Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said the kingdom’s main sovereign wealth fund (PIF) will surpass its target of increasing its financial clout to $600 billion by 2020, as part of the efforts to wean economy off oil.
“We are now above $300 billion, we’re getting close to $400 billion. Our target in 2020 is around $600 billion. I believe we will surpass that target in 2020,” the prince said in a Bloomberg interview published on Friday.
He added that the fund, with more than 50 percent of its investments located in Saudi Arabia will be investing in more places next year.
The young prince also said that the country’s 2019 budget will exceed 1 trillion riyals ($267 billion) for first time.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman also said the kingdom has met its promise to Washington to make up for Iranian crude oil supplies lost through U.S. sanctions.
“The request that America made to Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries is to be sure that if there is any loss of supply from Iran, that we will supply that. And that happened,” Prince Mohammed told Bloomberg on Friday.
“Iran reduced their exports by 700,000 barrels a day, if I’m not mistaken. And Saudi Arabia and OPEC and non-OPEC countries, they’ve produced 1.5 million barrels a day. So we export as much as 2 barrels for any barrel that disappeared from Iran recently. So we did our job and more.”
Russia and Saudi Arabia struck a private deal in September to raise oil output to cool rising prices and informed the United States before a meeting in Algiers with other producers, Reuters reported this week.
U.S. President Donald Trump has blamed the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) for high crude prices and called on it to boost output to bring down fuel costs before the U.S. congressional elections on Nov. 6.
Benchmark Brent oil LCOc1 rallied above $86 this week mainly stemming from a decline in oil exports from OPEC member Iran due to fresh U.S. sanctions. It settled at $84.16 a barrel on Friday.
Iran, OPEC’s third-largest producer, has accused Trump of orchestrating the oil price rally by imposing sanctions on Tehran and accused its regional arch-rival Saudi Arabia of bowing to U.S. pressure.
Saudi Arabia is the world’s top oil exporter and OPEC’s de-facto leader.

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