(Oct 29): Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio on Tuesday called Saudi Arabia’s de-facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman a “great leader,” and likened him to China’s Deng Xiaoping and Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew.
MBS, as the Saudi crown prince is known, has also been driving an ambitious multi-trillion dollar economic transformation agenda — Vision 2030 — to reduce the kingdom’s reliance on oil.
“I think his Royal Highness is a great leader,” Dalio said Tuesday on a panel at Riyadh’s Future Investment Initiative. “He’s almost like a Deng Xiaoping of China, in a sense, or a Lee Kuan Yew.”
Both Deng and Lee oversaw economic transformations while keeping a tight grip on power.
As prime minister from 1959 to 1990, Lee helped turned Singapore into Southeast Asia’s richest nation by opening it to foreign investors while emphasising incorruptibility and stability. Critics accused him of being overly authoritarian, especially for imposing instant fines for misdemeanors and the death penalty for serious crimes.
Deng, meanwhile, introduced market reforms that sparked China’s economic rise, while also ordering the deadly military crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
“One of the great things that the reason I’m weaving my life and my family’s involvement in terms of family office and so on into the Gulf Cooperation Council, is that it is one of those places, particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE, are places in which you have the basic fundamentals,” Dalio said.
Still, it remains to be seen how effective the Saudi prince’s economic transformation plan will be. Saudi Arabia continues to be hugely dependent on oil and has yet to become a world class hub for anything beyond crude and petrochemicals.
Dalio, who built Bridgewater into a US$160 billion (RM699.3 billion) behemoth, has close ties to the region. He’s been the face of Abu Dhabi’s recent success in drawing hedge fund luminaries and set up a branch of his personal investment firm in the emirate last year.
“I would say the most important thing when looking at different locations is first the financial — do you earn more money than you spend?” Dalio said. “Second, do you have internal order in which, rather than conflict, you have good leadership and management?”
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