Salient to Investors:
Fareed Zakaria said:
- Radical Islam is the default ideology of anger, discontent and violent opposition for a small number of alienated young Muslim men around the world. Only Muslims and particularly Arabs can cure this cancer.
- In the 12 years between 9/12/01 and 2013, only 42 Americans have died on US soil due to terrorism versus 32,351 who died because of firearms, 33,783 who died in-vehicle accidents in one year.
- Little has changed in Saudi Arabia – women still cannot drive, there is still segregation by sexes, the religious establishment is still very powerful, and the country still adheres to a very puritanical version of Islam.
Tony Blair said:
- King Abdullah was a genuine reformer and modernizer. Saudi Arabia is genuinely part of the solution, and in many ways the heart of Islam.
- Islamist ideology is growing and is the biggest security issue we face – we are at risk of several Afghanistans.
Martin Wolf at The Financial Times said:
- Saudi Arabia remains is the central oil producer, the biggest exporter, the cheapest producer, and the only swing producer. Saudi Arabia is stable enough so can outlast everybody else at current oil price levels.
- The oil glut will last for quite a few years.
Oxfam said the 80 richest people had $1.9 trillion while the poorest half had just $1.8 trillion in 2014, versus $1.3 trillion and $2.6 trillion respectively in 2010. The wealthiest 1% owned 48% of the world’s wealth in 2014 versus 44% in 2010.
David Leonhardt at The New York Times said US wages and incomes have gone virtually nowhere in the last 15 years: not paralleled since perhaps the Great Depression.
The Center for American Progress found that the bottom 90% of earners in Canada averaged over 1% annual income growth in the 2000s versus 2.5% annual in Australia and a decline of 1% annual in the US.
Watch the video at http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/category/gps-episodes/ or read the full transcript
at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1501/25/fzgps.01.html