Monday's rocket attack on a US-led military base outside the international airport in Erbil (Iraq claim an Iranian-backed group is responsible) is a reminder of the difficult path Iraq is navigating, with its ambitious reform agenda facing both polit...

Iraqi Finance Minister Ali Allawi said in late January that Iraq was in talks with the IMF for a US$6bn loan package, split between US$2bn in emergency funding and a US$4bn programme. This seems to imply that the RFI was not approved, and will disapp...

The risk is that the election delay triggers a resumption of mass protests (and the use of force against those protestors by militia threatened by any change to the status quo of formal politics). Protests kicked off in October 2019 and one of the co...

Most would agree that economic stress, and specifically unemployment, breeds populism, and in extreme cases, radicalisation and insecurity. It is the EM echo of the message from Bill Clinton's 1992 election strategist James Carville, "It's the econom...

The Central Bank of Iraq (CBI) announced on Saturday that it was devaluing the dinar peg by c20% from IQD1,182/US$ to 1,450/US$, and will sell dollars to local banks at the rate of 1,460/US$. This is the first currency devaluation since 2003, and the...

Iran may be regarded as recalcitrant by its geopolitical opponents, and even portrayed as rabid by the most virulent amongst those opponents, but investors looking at oil price and the Middle East (Saudi and the GCC, Iraq, Israel, and Lebanon) should...