Donald Trump Gets $600B From MBS, Supposedly

Way back in January 23, 2025, Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told US President Donald Trump that the kingdom wants to put $600B into expanded investment and trade with the United States over the next four years. 

And Trump, before even arriving in Saudi Arabia, expressed his desire to secure $1 trillion in investments from officials in Riyadh. As it happens, the president and his team couldn’t get nearly that much, but they did claim they were able to secure $600B in investments, which still sounded impressive.  

At least, that is, until people read the fine print. The New York Times reported May 13: "The White House on Tuesday said that President Trump, while in Saudi Arabia, had secured $600 billion in deals with the Saudi government and firms. But the details the White House provided were vague and totaled less than half that number. And a closer look at the projects the administration provided show several were already in the works before Trump took office".

Even before the announcement, Trump’s ambitions in this area were hard to take seriously. The entire Saudi sovereign wealth fund is worth about $925 billion, and it has already largely been committed to domestic priorities. The idea that Riyadh would make $600 billion in investments in the United States was, at face value, unbelievable. It was against this backdrop that NYT did the arithmetic and found that the deals announced by the White House “totaled around $283 billion”, not $600 billion, and some of the affected projects were from the Biden era.

Economists have already pointed out that making good on that investment pledge will be a challenge for the kingdom, which faces sky-high costs for its own Vision 2030 investment ambitions. Lower global oil prices and big-ticket public spending projects are sure to bring about widening budget deficits for Riyadh. 

Already, MBS as the kingdom’s de facto ruler is called, has a grand plan to diversify the oil-dependent country and which is likely to cost close to $2 trillion, according to estimates compiled by Bloomberg News. The sheer scale of domestic commitments – calculated by Bloomberg based on interviews with people familiar with the plans, US government projections, Saudi estimates and data from the researcher MEED – are transforming the kingdom’s role in the global economy. 

Decades of earning more money than it spent at home once left Saudi Arabia with huge surpluses to invest abroad. High domestic spending and falling oil prices have now sent that into reverse. The petrodollar spigot is still churning out vast amounts of cash, but transforming the Saudi economy is a very costly endeavour. 

“Trump is chasing $1 trillion of investments, but Saudi Arabia can’t deliver it”, said Ziad Daoud, the chief emerging markets economist of Bloomberg Economics, pointing to the kingdom's current account balance turning negative over the past year. “Saudi Arabia has become an importer of capital even with oil prices at relatively high levels, and it’s likely to remain until at least 2030. That’s going to reshape its relationship with the global economy”. 

Whatever the promise(s) made, the fact of the matter is that much of the money may not trickle into the US economy any time soon. 

“$1 trillion of new trade and investment over the next four years is not going to happen”, reiterated Tim Callen, a visiting scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. “It would represent a huge increase on recent levels and would basically represent all the assets of the kingdom’s $940 billion Public Investment Fund (PIF) and close to a full year of gross domestic product (GDP)”. 

And crude prices at around $63 a barrel put fresh pressure on the kingdom. Bloomberg Economics estimates that Saudi Arabia needs a price of $96 a barrel to balance its budget, and $113 if domestic spending by the PIF on MBS' projects is included. 

“Any external demands will only add pressure to an already stretched position”, Monica Malik, the chief economist of Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank PJSC, said.

To be sure, the Saudi government and the PIF have already started delaying some domestic investment plans and could delay them further or scale back some of its most ambitious plans. That would give them more room to spend in the short term. 

But the country’s stretched finances have started to show up in the rising pace of Saudi debt issuance. The government borrowed the most on record in the first quarter, even more than in the depths of 2020 when oil prices turned briefly negative.

Still, Saudi Arabia’s total debt stands at $354 billion, only around 30% of GDP and low by the standards of most other governments. It has over $400 billion of foreign reserves parked with the central bank and a large portion of that is US treasuries. 

“The current account will be in deficit in the coming years, meaning there will be no new money to invest overseas”, Callen said. “So they will either have to borrow or sell existing investments to finance new investments in the US or elsewhere”.

You should know by now that when Trump starts making over-the-top boasts, you really can't take him seriously. Any numbers being bandied about are at best, just commitments. TBH, I would think of them as being iffy. 

Let's wait and see if Saudi Arabia will actually cough up the money when the time comes. 😜😜😜

Malaysia's Pearly Tan-Thinaah Muralitharan stormed into the quarter-finals of the Thailand Open on Thursday when they exacted revenge on Indonesia's Lenny Tria Mayasari-Siti Fadia Ramadhanti – the pair who stunned them at the season-opening Malaysia Open in January. 

World No. 26 Lenny-Fadia had crushed home hopes in Kuala Lumpur, but there was no repeat in Bangkok as the well-prepared Malaysians battled to a 21-17, 10-21, 21-15 win in a 56-minute clash in the second round.