Kuwait Finance House, the Kuwaiti Islamic bank, will expand within the Middle East to Saudi Arabia, Oman and Qatar and may also look to expand in Asia. Currently, KFH operates only in Malaysia. The expansion will be funded by the recent $1.06 billion share sale.
The number of Malaysian Islamic banks continues to grow even as the conventional sector works to consolidate. This article is also available from Business Times as a pdf file.
CIMB Islamic appointed Sheikh Nizam Yaquby to its Shari'ah Supervisory Board for the next two years. Sh. Yaquby is a member of over 40 Islamic financial institutions' Shari'ah boards. The company's investment banking business will also triple its Islamic private equity funds.
The DIFC listing of its $1.25 billion sukuk on the DIFC pushes the amount of sukuk over the $10 billion mark.
Central Bank of Bahrain governor Rasheed Al-Maraj believes the Islamic finance industry needs to acheive greater harmonization to succeed.
Indonesian's second largest lender, PT Bank Central Asia Tbk, plans to enter the Islamic finance industry through an acquisition of two smaller lenders.
Turkey's Islamic banks (participation banks) are growing rapidly.
1 comment:
A lot of time is spent on the alpha versus beta debate but little consideration is given to another equally important but often ignored greek letter - rho or the sensitivity to changes in interest rates. Some San Diego business investors fund strategies have negative rho, that is depend on interest rates staying low. Ironically pension funds have positive rho as rising rates permit them to use a higher number to discount future liabilities. That can be a pyrrhic victory because on the asset side of the balance sheet their portfolios of stocks and bonds tend to fall in such times. It therefore makes sense for investors to diversify with OTHER strategies that tend to perform well in a RISING interest rate environment.
Post a Comment