The hosts of Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert, look at the online conversations of a money printer and how financialization has turned Saudi Aramco into a money-losing operation.
According to media reports, the company’s IPO is costing the kingdom billions. The debt taken on by Aramco and other Saudi bond offerings to pay dividends will be far more than the amount of money raised in the IPO.
“Financialization has its limits,” and “In Saudi Arabia we see a brilliant example of what happens when a country decides to go into financialization instead of, let’s say, diversifying into actual productive economic activity,” Max says.
To keep cash flowing and to solve the debt problem they went into an IPO, which has resulted in intensifying the debt problem, Max explains, noting “This is the limits of financialization.”
The whole situation is similar with that of IBM, where the company “financed themselves to death.”
“So, Saudi Arabia has financed itself into oblivion… and now the entire country is at risk of going under,” while the princes that run the kingdom never tried to figure out that “you cannot debt yourself into a growth,” says Max.
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