Gulf officials had a clear line for the US business community gathered in Miami this week at a Saudi Arabia-backed investment conference: stay calm and keep investing in the region.
The cautious pitch, delivered four weeks into a regional war sparked by the US-Israeli attack on Iran, marked a sharp contrast to a year ago when American investors were promised a new dawn of co-operation between the US and the oil-rich Gulf.
Yasir al-Rumayyan, head of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund — one of the world’s most powerful sovereign wealth funds and an investor in US companies such as Uber and Blackstone — barely mentioned the war when he opened the conference on Thursday.