Azzam on a bond market, SWF investments and more

Buried in an Emirates 24|7 notebook-dump today were a few good morsels from a talk by Henry Azzam, the CEO of Deutsche Bank in the MENA region. "Investment, financial brokerage and realty companies should be merged into strong entities," he said. We've been hearing about mergers for some time now, but as far as I can remember, no suggestion of melding investment companies and brokerages with property companies. Odd bedfellows, nay?

One thing that does make sense though: "It is illogical to have, for instance, 95 investment firms in a state like Kuwait, which represent 50 per cent of the companies listed on the Kuwait Stock Exchange." Ah, Kuwait.