Iraq's central bank will cut interest rates by one percentage point to 14 percent on Jan. 4. The good news is that Iraq's core inflation fell to 12.7 percent rate in November, from 13.6 percent in October.

I stumbled upon a great quote from Godvig Capital fund manager Bjorn Englund, whose $22 million Babylon fund is the only notable foreign portfolio investor in the Iraqi bourse. Englund, on the moral for investing in a downturn: “The lesson is that you shouldn’t follow the herd.  You have to go somewhere where other people are not, where you have the first-mover advantage.” As to Iraq in partiuclar, Englund mentioned that “there is very little foreign money in the market so it has not seen the sort of outflows you have had elsewhere.  The exchange has been immune to what has happened in the outside world.” Both Iraq and Ghana, whose market I touted not too long ago and is up roughly 60 percent this year, will soon become electronically traded, which should deliver greater volatility and ease of access for foreign investors in the hope ...

Danfonds noted last month that rising equity indexes in Iraq, amidst improving security, were in stark contrast to other stock markets around the world ravaged by the credit crunch. That said, the glass is not necessarily half full. The Economist’s Iraq briefing this week suggests that whatever ‘good news’ that may be coming from the country must be tempered by the realization that, as recently departed American General David Petraeus has repeatedly said, the gains remain “fragile and reversible”. 20,000 out of Iraq’s 34,000 doctors have left (after 2,000 were murdered) and few of the 2m-plus Iraqis now living abroad (many of them middle-class professionals) are yet willing to return. In the past few weeks, suicide-bombers have killed people at the checkpoints into Baghdad’s international zone, on the road to the airport, by one of the main bridges and outside the ...

Today’s New York Daily News has an interesting article about Obama’s foreign policy. In particular, it discusses how Obama has refused to factor in the fact that the Surge is working into his 16-month plan for withdrawal. This seems interesting considering that Obama has received enormous criticism for his recent “flip-flopping” or as we like to think of it - a series of steps to appear more moderate to the average American. The Iraq War has always been an issue that Obama felt strongly about - and it’s an issue where Obama has a vastly different stance than McCain. Even though his economic policies are becoming much more conservative, his determination to stick to his Iraq plan shows that he is still very much Barack Obama. But for the rest of the campaign, he’s going to get criticized no matter ...

...oil was the objective. Maybe. From ABC: Five years after the US-led coalition stormed into Iraq there is set to be another western invasion. This time it is the world's biggest oil companies leading the charge, 36 years after Saddam Hussein kicked them out. The oil giants are seeking access to Iraq's rich crude reserves, Australian companies BHP Billiton and Woodside are among them. The Iraqi government wants to make up for the lost opportunities under Hussein's rule and has the ambitious goal of doubling Iraqi oil production to more than 4 million barrels a day within five years. Peter Zeihan, an energy analyst at geopolitical intelligence group Stratfor, says there is plenty of incentive for the big oil companies. "They have the largest, easiest reservoirs to tap, they're very close to existing export points, there's infrastructure in place for over double the amount of oil that currently is being produced in Iraq," Mr Zeihan said. "When ...