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Euromoney Awards for Excellence 2009
Country risk 2010:

Country risk 2010:

Bi-annual Country risk survey monitoring political and economic stability of 186 countries

September 2008

Can the West Bank spring a surprise?

Palestine is a surprisingly attractive prospect – good enough to hold the attention of private and public investors at a conference this year. But Gaza, which must develop pari passu with the West Bank if the Territories are to prosper, is an unstable imponderable. Chris Wright reports.




Palestinian banks: resilient but underemployed
Palestinian stock exchange: ‘We never closed'

SUMMITS COME AND summits go but it was quite something to be at the first Palestine Investment Conference in Bethlehem in May. The investments committed at the event, which Palestine’s prime minister Salam Fayyad put at $1.4 billion, were significant but it was the conference’s very existence that held the real importance: 1,500 delegates, 500 of them from abroad, congregating on the West Bank to talk about investing in it rather than shunning it.

The world wants Palestine to work. That’s evident from the $7.1 billion of donor pledges to the Palestinian Territories (the West Bank and Gaza) made at meetings in Paris in December. The theory is that a stable and economically viable Palestine, eventually in the shape of an independent state, would defuse one of the most volatile flashpoints of the Arab world....


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Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are too big to fail by an order of magnitude, in terms of the contingent liability to the federal government.

Thomas Stanton, a Washington attorney who once worked for Fannie Mae. From the archive: Freddie and Fannie arent sovereign, July 1999

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