🇾🇪⚔️🇸🇦 The Wall Street Journal reports Saudi king, Mohammed bin Salman al Saud (MBS) is changing palaces and bunkers every night to avoid assassination

The WSJ also reports that the Houthi missile campaign against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia may erase any GDP growth the country was forecasted to have this year and send it into recession

Not only did Ansarallah harm the KSA's oil industry by targeting its refineries, oil export terminals and more recently, its oil fields, the recent attacks on the Riyadh Airport are "jeopardizing Saudi efforts to build travel and tourism into a pillar of the economy".

The Future Investment Initiative, an investment summit hosted by the KSA each year is scheduled to take place in a few weeks with big U.S. CEOs like Larry Fink, Jamie Dimon and Ray Dalio invited to speak but its unlikely that they will show up in person due to the threats of missile attacks.

The costs of repairing infrastructure, funding for the KSA military and the Yemeni Presidential Leadership Council (PLC) are widening the KSA's budget deficit threatening the country's financial stability. This could cause ripple effects in the U.S. as the KSA is a major investor and financier of tech industry and artificial intelligence projects and MBS may be forced to cut back some of these investments to fund the war against the Houthis.

President Trump told reporters over the weekend that the U.S. was in communication with the Houthis but might join Saudi strikes on the militant group. “What they did was very bad,” the president said Saturday night.

Foreign investment fell in the first two quarters of the year and is running well behind the crown prince’s 2030 target. Rising defense and infrastructure costs threaten to siphon away money needed for the economic diversification drive. Even the kingdom’s push to become an AI hub now carries new risks, with data centers emerging as targets.

Many of the enormous projects spearheaded by Prince Mohammed are stalled or under review. In January, Saudi Arabia gave up on plans to host the 2029 Asian Winter Games. It still has to find a way to fund the World Expo in 2030 and the soccer World Cup four years later.

The non-oil side of the country’s economy was smaller in the second quarter than in the first, according to Capital Economics. The Saudi Finance Ministry now expects GDP to shrink by 3.6% in 2026.

🔗 https://archive.ph/a9uet