The ‘Mega Forces’ Spreading Middle East Wealth Across the Globe

When Iran launched a missile barrage at an American air base in Qatar this summer, it was one of the most direct attacks on US assets in the Middle East in years. Yet just hours after the projectiles were shot down in the night sky over Doha, it was business as usual in the country’s capital and financial hub. In neighboring Abu Dhabi, investments proceeded on track, and bankers in Dubai expressed confidence that the United Arab Emirates would sidestep any major fallout. In the weeks after the attack, Bloomberg News reported that American companies including BlackRock Inc. and Elon Musk’s xAI were discussing deals in Saudi Arabia.

It will apparently take more than a few ballistic missiles to shake the business community’s confidence in the Middle East. With its low-tax regimes and growing pool of sovereign and family wealth—which now tops $5 trillion—the region has weathered all kinds of instability. Even as conflict in the area has greatly intensified since 2023, investors there are signaling that the Middle East is still open for business, and global companies are eager to accept their money.

The Middle East, according to the BlackRock Investment Institute, finds itself at the intersection of three “mega forces” affecting investing now: geopolitical fragmentation, the energy transition and artificial intelligence. The region’s combination of reliable energy resources and oil-financed scale—along with a track record of success—could keep driving capital returns, says Ben Powell, BlackRock’s chief investment strategist for the Asia-Pacific and Middle East. “We are back to feeling quite constructive,” he says, “while of course being appropriately nervous and watchful around the geopolitical risk, which is ongoing, real and unpredictable.”  Some even see opportunity in the heightened turbulence.

Foreign investors have long held out hope for peace in the Middle East, but it’s never been a precondition for doing business there.  Meanwhile multinational companies, Wall Street banks, hedge funds and the world’s wealthy have forged new deals in the Middle East, a trend that’s only accelerated in the two years since regional conflict intensified with Israel’s war in Gaza. Unrest elsewhere in the world has even benefited the Persian Gulf: After the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, wealthy Russians bought up real estate in Dubai, seeking to diversify their rubles and serving as a fillip to property prices that were already shooting up after the Covid-19 pandemic.

Although each new conflict brings a frisson of uncertainty, resilience has become the norm. “It is striking that this has been viewed by investors with a certain resolute optimism,” Dominic Raab, former deputy prime minister of the UK and current head of global affairs at Appian Capital Advisory, notes of this most recent flareup, “especially in the context of the longer-term big picture in the region.”