00:00The UAE's post-pandemic boom is being tested by a regional war that's showing few signs of
00:05resolution. But despite the massive challenge posed by the conflict, the country's economy is
00:10looking resilient. Abu Dhabi's wealth funds are still investing billions, malls and restaurants
00:16remain bustling, and new private schools are opening in Dubai. So to help us make sense of
00:23all of this, we're now joined by Bloomberg's Zainab Fatah. Zainab, I can already tell the
00:28traffic that is downstairs at rush hour. It shows me enough about the resilience that we speak about
00:35in this intro. But talk to us about just what Dubai or what the UAE has been going through and
00:41what challenges it faced and that concept of resilience, how it's managed to achieve it.
00:46It's truly surprising in a way. Many of us who have been watching the country for years and we saw
00:52this
00:52big shock with the war happening, kind of were watching for September to see once schools open up
00:59what the city will look like. And in a way, it's been surprisingly resilient because when you go
01:06around schools areas, you have so much traffic. School numbers have been growing on net, even though
01:14earlier in the conflict, we saw that some people left the city and pulled their kids out of the schools.
01:19And as you said, when we're looking at restaurants and malls and other engines of the economy,
01:26retail, still there is a lot of activity happening. Of course, we're in this weird state of, as Gargash
01:33called it, no peace, no war. And in a way, that's always weighing, that risk is weighing on people's
01:40decisions and the way they look at the city and whether to invest or not. When we look at the
01:46real
01:47state market, which is a big barometer of how the city is doing, we see that there is this kind
01:54of
01:54accelerated a little bit of the correction that many people anticipated that was coming even before
02:01the war started. Yeah. But the corrections hasn't been as massive as other corrections in previous
02:07years or even nearer. OK. Let's add it to be sure because we're still dealing with a war that is
02:14still at the
02:15doorstep of this entire region. How long can the UAE maintain this resilient environment in the midst of a
02:23protracted conflict? I mean, it depends really on what happens. So far, still Jabal Ali is a shadow of his
02:31former
02:31self. It's still not operating like it was before. Up and down the Gulf, we see that cities in Kuwait
02:40and Bahrain,
02:41even all the way to Iraq. Oil shipments have been kind of way, way less than before. So this economic
02:50impact
02:51is still there and we should not, you know, downplay it. There is an economic impact and it's impacting
02:58the stability of the region. But they're going to try to continue to do everything they could. So they we
03:07saw
03:07recently in the Brexit meeting. There was a meeting between the president of Iran and the Crown Prince of
03:12Abu Dhabi. So there is that hedging thing going on to try to contain any escalation.
03:17of this kind of situation.
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