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Qatar: Qatar, a major investor in
U.S. and European assets, worries that haphazard attempts by
countries to shore up their economies could weaken the dollar and
the euro, its prime minister said.
“What should happen is we should have a full package with a full
strategy to solve the problems,” news agency Reuters quoted Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani,
who also heads the country’s sovereign wealth fund, Qatar
Investment Authority (QIA), as saying to U.S. financial broadcaster CNBC
in an interview aired on Friday.
This month the U.S. Federal Reserve announced a program of heavy
purchases of mortgage-backed securities in an effort to boost
employment, but the U.S. government has so far failed to reassure
financial markets that it has an effective plan to cut its budget
deficit and boost economic growth.
The European Central Bank has also said it will buy bonds to
protect economies from the euro zone debt crisis, but governments
of weak countries such as Greece and Spain have not persuaded
investors their debts can be cut to safe levels.
Sheikh Hamad said the central banks were right to act to prevent
worse crises, but added: “With more printing money, without having
a strategy, I believe the value of the money will go down very
soon.”
He did not give details of the economic measures which he believed
Western countries should be taking, but said the risk of further
volatility in markets was making investors such as Qatar cautious.
Analysts have estimated the size of Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund
at around $100 billion.
“There are some questions with no answer up to now,” Reuters
quoted him as saying during the CNBC interview.
However, Sheikh Hamad added that Qatar would retain holdings of
strategic stocks and buy when prices dropped, and that it would
continue to make new investments in promising assets.
He said he was optimistic about the longer-term future of the
banking industry, since better regulation and capital-raising
would strengthen banks after some years. He noted that QIA had a
strategic stake in Credit Suisse , and owned about 1 percent of
Bank of America and 5 percent of Santander Brasil among other
banks.
The gas-rich Gulf state has bought more than $5 billion or $6
billion of real estate assets over the last four to five months,
mostly in the United States and Europe, Sheikh Hamad said. “If
there is some good opportunity, why not,” he said of investing in
crisis-hit Europe.
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