Saudis are animals. "Journalist beaten & fingers cut off". Trump wake up?

[vickissick07]

No one's calling for war moron except the alt right garbage sites who feed you your talking points.

SAD

no, i want a war with them because they continuously cuck us. Because they fund ISIS and other terrorist groups. Because they caused genocide in Yemen. Because they had a hand in 9/11. Because they seemingly have so much power, that no matter what that backward, evil azz, 15th century barbaric regime does, the answer from us has been to take it on the chin and keep it moving. We wouldnt even let Russia get away with something this (relatively) benign but we let SA get away with everything.

You sure about that? I hope war happens and then Trump declares martial law and makes himself president for life in a time of crisis just to watch your ****ing head explode.

[SillieBazzillie]

LOL @ you and your cope degree telling me to get educated. LOL @ bragging over a major that most football players major in.

Just LOL.

lmfao. You're the one complaining "hur dur I cants afford another $10 to fill up my jacked up truck hur dur"

[deepfat]

lmfao. You're the one complaining "hur dur I cants afford another $10 to fill up my jacked up truck hur dur"

Actually, I ride a motorcycle. Benefits of living in perfect weather 365 days a year.

[vickissick07]

Again maybe Trump could do something about Saudi if every president before him didn't sell us out to them.

This is what ONE person in Saudi owns in the US. ONE PERSON


On Saturday, Saudi Arabia ordered the arrest of dozens of royal members and current and former government ministers over corruption charges, The New York Times reported. The list includes Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a billionaire investor with tangled business ties with American companies.

CNBC said in a report that arresting Prince Alwaleed is “like arresting Warren Buffett or Bill Gates in the U.S.”

Forbes estimated Prince Alwaleed’s net worth at $18.7 billion before the arrest was made public on Saturday. Hours after the news broke, the share price of Saudi-listed Kingdom Holding Company, of which Alwaleed owns 95 percent, plunged by 10 percent, causing a $2 billion contraction in his net worth.

Kingdom Holding is a $33 billion conglomerate founded by Prince Alwaleed in 1980. It’s one of the largest private investment companies in the world, with investments across a wide range of industries and geographies, including American companies large and small.

Here is a list of U.S. companies Prince Alwaleed has significant stakes in, and the year he invested:

Citigroup, 1991

Saks Incorporated (Saks Fifth Avenue), 1993

The Plaza Hotel New York, 1995 — The Plaza was owned by Donald Trump from 1988 to 1992. Prince Alwaleed purchased a controlling stake in 1995.

News Corp, 1997 — Prince Alwaleed owns 5.5 percent of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

Time Warner, 1997 — Prince Alwaleed owns 5 percent.

AOL, 1997

Apple, 1997 — Prince Alwaleed purchased more than 5 percent of Apple’s shares in 1997 for $115 million.

Motorola, 1997

Ebay, 2000

Twitter, 2011 — Prince Alwaleed raised his Twitter stakes in 2015 to 5 percent. He is the second largest shareholder of the company.

Snap Inc., 2015

Lyft, 2015 — Prince Alwaleed, along with General Motors and other nine investors, chipped in $1 billion in Lyft’s series F capital raising.


https://observer.com/2017/11/the-arr...-us-companies/

[SaltyDog920]

And yet that policy has ruined the middle east, and a good part of the world. It has empowered Jihadism.

No, you moron. Archaic belief systems fueled by a barbaric, uneducated populous have caused ALL the problems in the middle east. Policy is a byproduct of barbaric actions.

[SillieBazzillie]

Actually, I ride a motorcycle. Benefits of living in perfect weather 365 days a year.

Then stfu about gas prices. Hey I think I saw you "riding" the other day!

[SaltyDog920]

Then stfu about gas prices. Hey I think I saw you "riding" the other day!

That's a moped. He said motorcycle. Reading comprehension not even once?

[vickissick07]

Failure was not an option.

It was July 1974. A steady predawn drizzle had given way to overcast skies when William Simon, newly appointed U.S. Treasury secretary, and his deputy, Gerry Parsky, stepped onto an 8 a.m. flight from Andrews Air Force Base. On board, the mood was tense. That year, the oil crisis had hit home. An embargo by OPEC's Arab nations-payback for U.S. military aid to the Israelis during the Yom Kippur War-quadrupled oil prices. Inflation soared, the stock market crashed, and the U.S. economy was in a tailspin.

Officially, Simon's two-week trip was billed as a tour of economic diplomacy across Europe and the Middle East, full of the customary meet-and-greets and evening banquets. But the real mission, kept in strict confidence within President Richard Nixon's inner circle, would take place during a four-day layover in the coastal city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

The goal: neutralize crude oil as an economic weapon and find a way to persuade a hostile kingdom to finance America's widening deficit with its newfound petrodollar wealth. And according to Parsky, Nixon made clear there was simply no coming back empty-handed. Failure would not only jeopardize America's financial health but could also give the Soviet Union an opening to make further inroads into the Arab world.

It "wasn't a question of whether it could be done or it couldn't be done," said Parsky, 73, one of the few officials with Simon during the Saudi talks.

At first blush, Simon, who had just done a stint as Nixon's energy czar, seemed ill-suited for such delicate diplomacy. Before being tapped by Nixon, the chain-smoking New Jersey native ran the vaunted Treasuries desk at Salomon Brothers. To career bureaucrats, the brash Wall Street bond trader-who once compared himself to Genghis Khan-had a temper and an outsize ego that was painfully out of step in Washington. Just a week before setting foot in Saudi Arabia, Simon publicly lambasted the Shah of Iran, a close regional ally at the time, calling him a "nut."
U.S. discloses Saudi Arabia's Treasuries holdings for first time

But Simon, better than anyone else, understood the appeal of U.S. government debt and how to sell the Saudis on the idea that America was the safest place to park their petrodollars. With that knowledge, the administration hatched an unprecedented do-or-die plan that would come to influence just about every aspect of U.S.-Saudi relations over the next four decades (Simon died in 2000 at the age of 72).

The basic framework was strikingly simple. The United States would buy oil from Saudi Arabia and provide the kingdom military aid and equipment. In return, the Saudis would plow billions of their petrodollar revenue back into Treasuries and finance America's spending.

It took several discreet follow-up meetings to iron out all the details, Parsky said. But at the end of months of negotiations, there remained one small, yet crucial, catch: King Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud demanded the country's Treasury purchases stay "strictly secret," according to a diplomatic cable obtained by Bloomberg from the National Archives database.
Buying bonds and all that was a strategy to recycle petrodollars back into the U.S. ... it's always been an ambiguous, constrained relationship. — David Ottaway, Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington

With a handful of Treasury and Federal Reserve officials, the secret was kept for more than four decades-until now. In response to a Freedom-of-Information-Act request submitted by Bloomberg News, the Treasury broke out Saudi Arabia's holdings for the first time this month after "concluding that it was consistent with transparency and the law to disclose the data," according to spokeswoman Whitney Smith. The $117 billion trove makes the kingdom one of America's largest foreign creditors.

Yet in many ways, the information has raised more questions than it has answered. A former Treasury official, who specialized in central bank reserves and asked not to be identified, says the official figure vastly understates Saudi Arabia's investments in U.S. government debt, which may be double or more.

The current tally represents just 20 percent of its $587 billion of foreign reserves, well below the two-thirds that central banks typically keep in dollar assets. Some analysts speculate the kingdom may be masking its U.S. debt holdings by accumulating Treasuries through offshore financial centers, which show up in the data of other countries.

Exactly how much of America's debt Saudi Arabia actually owns is something that matters more now than ever before.

While oil's collapse has deepened concern that Saudi Arabia will need to liquidate its Treasuries to raise cash, a more troubling worry has also emerged: the specter of the kingdom using its outsize position in the world's most important debt market as a political weapon, much as it did with oil in the 1970s.

In April, Saudi Arabia warned it would start selling as much as $750 billion in Treasuries and other assets if Congress passes a bill allowing the kingdom to be held liable in U.S. courts for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to the New York Times. The threat comes amid a renewed push by presidential candidates and legislators from both the Democratic and Republican parties to declassify a 28-page section of a 2004 U.S. government report that is believed to detail possible Saudi connections to the attacks. The bill, which passed the Senate on May 17, is now in the House of Representatives.

Saudi Arabia's Finance Ministry declined to comment on the potential selling of Treasuries in response. The Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency didn't immediately answer requests for details on the total size of its U.S. government debt holdings.

"Let's not assume they're bluffing" about threatening to retaliate, said Marc Chandler, the global head of currency strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman. "The Saudis are under a lot of pressure. I'd say that we don't do ourselves justice if we underestimate our liabilities" to big holders.

Saudi Arabia, which has long provided free health care, gasoline subsidies, and routine pay raises to its citizens with its petroleum wealth, already faces a brutal fiscal crisis.

In the past year alone, the monetary authority has burned through $111 billion of reserves to plug its biggest budget deficit in a quarter-century, pay for costly wars to defeat the Islamic State, and wage proxy campaigns against Iran. Though oil has stabilized at about $50 a barrel (from less than $30 earlier this year), it's still far below the heady years of $100-a-barrel crude.

Saudi Arabia's situation has become so acute the kingdom is now selling a piece of its crown jewel-state oil company Saudi Aramco.

What's more, the commitment to the decades-old policy of "interdependence" between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, which arose from Simon's debt deal and ultimately bound together two nations that share few common values, is showing signs of fraying. America has taken tentative steps toward a rapprochement with Iran, highlighted by President Barack Obama's landmark nuclear deal last year. The U.S. shale boom has also made America far less reliant on Saudi oil.

"Buying bonds and all that was a strategy to recycle petrodollars back into the U.S.," said David Ottaway, a Middle East fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington. But politically, "it's always been an ambiguous, constrained relationship."

Yet back in 1974, forging that relationship (and the secrecy that it required) was a no-brainer, according to Parsky, who is now chairman of Aurora Capital Group, a private equity firm in Los Angeles. Many of America's allies, including the U.K. and Japan, were also deeply dependent on Saudi oil and quietly vying to get the kingdom to reinvest money back into their own economies.

"Everyone-in the U.S., France, Britain, Japan-was trying to get their fingers in the Saudis' pockets," said Gordon S. Brown, an economic officer with the State Department at the U.S. embassy in Riyadh from 1976 to 1978.

For the Saudis, politics played a big role in their insistence that all Treasury investments remain anonymous.

Tensions still flared 10 months after the Yom Kippur War, and throughout the Arab world, there was plenty of animosity toward the U.S. for its support of Israel. According to diplomatic cables, King Faisal's biggest fear was the perception Saudi oil money would, "directly or indirectly," end up in the hands of its biggest enemy in the form of additional U.S. assistance.

Treasury officials solved the dilemma by letting the Saudis in through the back door. In the first of many special arrangements, the U.S. allowed Saudi Arabia to bypass the normal competitive bidding process for buying Treasuries by creating "add-ons." Those sales, which were excluded from the official auction totals, hid all traces of Saudi Arabia's presence in the U.S. government debt market.

"When I arrived at the embassy, I was told by people there that this is Treasury's business," Brown said. "It was all handled very privately."

By 1977, Saudi Arabia had accumulated about 20 percent of all Treasuries held abroad, according to The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets by Columbia University's David Spiro.

Another exception was carved out for Saudi Arabia when the Treasury started releasing monthly country-by-country breakdowns of U.S. debt ownership. Instead of disclosing Saudi Arabia's holdings, the Treasury grouped them with 14 other nations, such as Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Nigeria, under the generic heading "oil exporters"-a practice that continued for 41 years.

The system came with its share of headaches. After the Treasury's add-on facility was opened to other central banks, erratic and unpublicized foreign demand threatened to push the U.S. over its debt limit on several occasions.

An internal memo, dated October 1976, detailed how the U.S. inadvertently raised far more than the $800 million it intended to borrow at auction. At the time, two unidentified central banks used add-ons to buy an additional $400 million of Treasuries each. In the end, one bank was awarded its portion a day late to keep the U.S. from exceeding the limit.

Most of these maneuvers and hiccups were swept under the rug, and top Treasury officials went to great lengths to preserve the status quo and protect their Middle East allies as scrutiny of America's biggest creditors increased.

Over the years, the Treasury repeatedly turned to the International Investment and Trade in Services Survey Act of 1976-which shields individuals in countries where Treasuries are narrowly held-as its first line of defense.

The strategy continued even after the Government Accountability Office, in a 1979 investigation, found "no statistical or legal basis" for the blackout. The GAO didn't have power to force the Treasury to turn over the data, but it concluded the U.S. "made special commitments of financial confidentiality to Saudi Arabia" and possibly other OPEC nations.

Simon, who had by then returned to Wall Street, acknowledged in congressional testimony that "regional reporting was the only way in which Saudi Arabia would agree" to invest using the add-on system.

"It was clear the Treasury people weren't going to cooperate at all," said Stephen McSpadden, a former counsel to the congressional subcommittee that pressed for the GAO inquiries. "I'd been at the subcommittee for 17 years, and I'd never seen anything like that."

Today, Parsky says the secret arrangement with the Saudis should have been dismantled years ago and was surprised the Treasury kept it in place for so long. But even so, he has no regrets.


http://www.chicagotribune.com/busine...531-story.html

[Derplington]

Again maybe Trump could do something about Saudi if every president before him didn't sell us out to them.

This is what ONE person in Saudi owns in the US. ONE PERSON


On Saturday, Saudi Arabia ordered the arrest of dozens of royal members and current and former government ministers over corruption charges, The New York Times reported. The list includes Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a billionaire investor with tangled business ties with American companies.

CNBC said in a report that arresting Prince Alwaleed is “like arresting Warren Buffett or Bill Gates in the U.S.”

Forbes estimated Prince Alwaleed’s net worth at $18.7 billion before the arrest was made public on Saturday. Hours after the news broke, the share price of Saudi-listed Kingdom Holding Company, of which Alwaleed owns 95 percent, plunged by 10 percent, causing a $2 billion contraction in his net worth.

Kingdom Holding is a $33 billion conglomerate founded by Prince Alwaleed in 1980. It’s one of the largest private investment companies in the world, with investments across a wide range of industries and geographies, including American companies large and small.

Here is a list of U.S. companies Prince Alwaleed has significant stakes in, and the year he invested:

Citigroup, 1991

Saks Incorporated (Saks Fifth Avenue), 1993

The Plaza Hotel New York, 1995 — The Plaza was owned by Donald Trump from 1988 to 1992. Prince Alwaleed purchased a controlling stake in 1995.

News Corp, 1997 — Prince Alwaleed owns 5.5 percent of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

Time Warner, 1997 — Prince Alwaleed owns 5 percent.

AOL, 1997

Apple, 1997 — Prince Alwaleed purchased more than 5 percent of Apple’s shares in 1997 for $115 million.

Motorola, 1997

Ebay, 2000

Twitter, 2011 — Prince Alwaleed raised his Twitter stakes in 2015 to 5 percent. He is the second largest shareholder of the company.

Snap Inc., 2015

Lyft, 2015 — Prince Alwaleed, along with General Motors and other nine investors, chipped in $1 billion in Lyft’s series F capital raising.

This is some good stuff. Thanks for sharing. I had no idea.

[deepfat]

That's a moped. He said motorcycle. Reading comprehension not even once?

It's actually a scooter as a moped has pedals like a bicycle. Still, Sillie is a moron and gets embarrassed in this subforum on the reg.

[vickissick07]

Saudi Arabia owns so much of the US economy that if we went to war with them they could crash our economy.

You stupid fuks think everything is just so simple and we can just slap sanctions on everybody who does something we don't like

Want to blame somebody? Blame the presidents of past who sold us out.

[Dan_S]

So a journalist living in the US, writing for a US newspaper gets dismembered, and you cowards think the country in which he lived and which is home to the newspaper he wrote for should do NOTHING?

No one is suggesting we bomb Saudi, but some kind of sanctions are needed so the world knows that you can't just go around snatching up people who call the US home and who are members of the free press.

Man you girls are estrogen filled bitch cowards.

SAD

He was a Saudi Arabian citizen.

He was a Saudi Arabian citizen.

He was a Saudi Arabian citizen.

He was a Saudi Arabian citizen.

I feel like this is the same retarded logic about illegal immigrants. It's like liberals refuse to acknowledge citizenship and only care about where someone lives.

I care about expending US resources on US citizens. Everyone else can get fukked.

[EsB818]

Liberals hate peace

They're absolutely enraged that Trump is not deploying troops and drone striking some third world chit hole

This. What happened to the libs who were against the Iraq war and were peaceniks? Now they’d gladly see thousands of people die in conflict if it somehow makes “orange man look bad.” Disgusting.

[Vexidi]

So a "resident" journalist pokes a hornets nest with a stick, gets stung, and democrats are willing to get into a potentially catastrophic economic situation without even having all the facts straight yet. Once again they prove just how stupid they really are. I love the tough talk from the party of transgender lactose intolerant pussies. Really the icing on the cake.

[kcadrenalin]

Well at least they didn't waterboard him.

[VoxExMachina]

From what I've seen out of journalists, the world could use fewer of them.

[vickissick07]

From what I've seen out of journalists, the world could use fewer of them.

Best comment in the entire thread.

[Procta]

lol here we go, using Clinton techniques


Saudi who arrived in Turkey day of Khashoggi disappearance dies in ‘traffic accident’

https://nypost.com/2018/10/18/saudi-...ffic-accident/

[PSToolman]

Murdering a journalist like this is an act of terrorism and a threat to peace.
Doing nothing about it because of a pending arms deal is poor leadership and a threat to peace.
Selling arms to a regime because "if we don't someone else will" is anti-American and a threat to peace.

[Cleveland33]

Murdering a journalist like this is an act of terrorism and a threat to peace.
Doing nothing about it because of a pending arms deal is poor leadership and a threat to peace.
Selling arms to a regime because "if we don't someone else will" is anti-American and a threat to peace.

there's that word again

[vickissick07]

Murdering a journalist like this is an act of terrorism and a threat to peace.
Doing nothing about it because of a pending arms deal is poor leadership and a threat to peace.
Selling arms to a regime because "if we don't someone else will" is anti-American and a threat to peace.

We're doing nothing about it because they own a large part of our economy dip****.

Also, who gives a **** if they dude was a 'journalist'

And libs like to act like the 'neocons' are the war mongers.

[kingmanaverage]

Every time a US citizen is murdered in a different country, we should sanction that country

- Libs

If the government of another country orders the murder of a US citizen, then there should be serious consequences. If the murder has nothing to do with anything, ie stabbed in an argument at the bar, there's very little that can be done.

[Retoaded]

liberals are interventionist hawks now. who knew?

[deepfat]

If the government of another country orders the murder of a US citizen, then there should be serious consequences. If the murder has nothing to do with anything, ie stabbed in an argument at the bar, there's very little that can be done.

He wasn't a US citizen.

[Dan_S]

We're doing nothing about it because they own a large part of our economy dip****.

Also, who gives a **** if they dude was a 'journalist'

And libs like to act like the 'neocons' are the war mongers.

I'd say we're doing nothing because it has literally fuk-all to do with us.

Guy gets murdered by his own country halfway across the world. What does this have to do with the United States?

[Procta]

So a "resident" journalist pokes a hornets nest with a stick, gets stung, and democrats are willing to get into a potentially catastrophic economic situation without even having all the facts straight yet. Once again they prove just how stupid they really are. I love the tough talk from the party of transgender lactose intolerant pussies. Really the icing on the cake.

need knee jerk reaction for muh feels for maximum virtue signaling

[vickissick07]

I'd say we're doing nothing because it has literally fuk-all to do with us.

Guy gets murdered by his own country halfway across the world. What does this have to do with the United States?

I agree, but there was one dude posting about them being responsbile for 9-11 and all of that, but then there's this....



"In April, Saudi Arabia warned it would start selling as much as $750 billion in Treasuries and other assets if Congress passes a bill allowing the kingdom to be held liable in U.S. courts for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to the New York Times. The threat comes amid a renewed push by presidential candidates and legislators from both the Democratic and Republican parties to declassify a 28-page section of a 2004 U.S. government report that is believed to detail possible Saudi connections to the attacks. The bill, which passed the Senate on May 17, is now in the House of Representatives."


They can send our economy into a tailspin thanks to leaders in the past who sold us out for oil. The world isn't as simple as they'd like to believe.

[deepfat]

I'd say we're doing nothing because it has literally fuk-all to do with us.

Guy gets murdered by his own country halfway across the world. What does this have to do with the United States?

It has everything to do with Trump's beef with the media and it's three weeks before the midterms.

So, the left is trying to paint Trump as a guy who doesn't give a chit about a journalist being murdered overseas even if the journalist isn't a US citizen and willingly walked into the Saudi embassy after talking chit about the Saudis for years. What could possibly go wrong?

Long story short, they're trying to sling mud at the wall and see if it sticks. Sign of desperation within the Democrat party.

[Retoaded]

Murdering a journalist like this is an act of terrorism and a threat to peace.
Doing nothing about it because of a pending arms deal is poor leadership and a threat to peace.
Selling arms to a regime because "if we don't someone else will" is anti-American and a threat to peace.

but the russian reset is cool. selling china missile tech is cool. making deals with iran is cool. making deals with the Saudis WAS cool when Obama's state department was doing it. Now its a threat to peace.

LMAO.

[EsB818]

liberals are interventionist hawks now. who knew?

Yeah when ISIS was beheading AMERICAN journalists and burning Christians alive in cages and Obama was doing next to nothing and dismissing them as the “JV team” not a fuking peep from these hypocrites.