Could the kind of mayhem that hit US markets last week make an appearance in the Middle East?

Which should business executives prioritize when making a strategic decision about office location: Potential for doing business or quality of lifestyle?

The final proof, for anybody still requiring it, that financial markets are totally divorced from the everyday world most people inhabit has come in the past week. Call it the Insurrection Boom.

“Rome was not built in a day,” the saying goes, and it is obvious that the challenges of building a new metropolis from scratch are enormous.

You have to go all the way back to the 1970s and the era of the “oil shocks” to find a time as tumultuous for global energy markets as 2020 has been.

At Tadawul, the Saudi Stock Exchange, they might be forgiven for asking: “Crisis? What crisis?”

A couple of weeks has passed since the financial structure of Saudi Electricity Company (SEC) was transformed by a radical revamp, and it appears the markets like what they have seen — now that there has been a little time to digest the implications.

“Come round for a cup of tea,” was the cordial invitation from Philip Green one cold January day in 2005. So off I trudged to the offices of Arcadia Group on London’s Oxford Street.

The oil world was abuzz at the end of last week on speculation that the UAE might be on the verge of pulling out of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

In the campaign to combat climate change, the biggest challenge is China. As the world’s most populous country and its biggest manufacturer, China’s indigenous energy resources are dominated by coal, the least environmentally friendly of the hydrocarbons.