Ray Dalio speaks during the 2023 Forbes Iconoclast Summit at Pier 60 on June 12, 2023 in New York City.
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ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Amid a turbulent global environment, hedge fund titan Ray Dalio sees one particular part of the world as holding promise for investors: the Middle East’s Gulf states.
The Bridgewater Associates founder specifically highlighted the United Arab Emirates, while speaking during a CNBC panel at Abu Dhabi Finance Week.
“We’re talking today about how the world order is changing, and how the region, the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) region is becoming an important region. It’s very classic. It’s a renaissance state. We’re now talking about a renaissance state here that happens within this greater geopolitical and economic environment,” Dalio told CNBC’s Dan Murphy on Tuesday.
Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates is the world’s largest hedge fund, which had $97.2 billion in assets under management as of September 2023, according to the latest annual report by Pensions & Investments.
The UAE “is a renaissance state,” Dalio said. “What I mean is, I look for fundamentally, do you earn more than you spend? So [do] you have a good income statement? Do you have a good balance sheet? Are your assets greater than your liabilities?”
He added, “Do you have a culture in which there’s the development of people and the working together of those people to be productive?,” he continued.
“And number four would be, are you outside of a great power conflict? Are you in the middle of the war? Or are you outside the war? And so, I look at that around the world as to the places I want to invest in, the places I want to be. And this region is very, very attractive and is at the takeoff point for the reasons that were discussed in the other sessions.”
Many economic observers have pointed to the Gulf states, particularly the UAE and Saudi Arabia, as leveraging their oil wealth, geographic location between eastern…
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