IslamicFinance.de

The Financial Times produced a special looking into the Future of Islamic Finance.

The download is free of charge.

Yasaar media published a new report called Islamic Finance in North America 2009 for free download, which is co-published by Codexa Capital, UM Financial Group, King & Spalding, and Doha Islamic.

According to the report Islamic finance in North America has developed along two quite separate paths:

• The first path focuses on retail Islamic finance and centres mostly on home financing products and credit cards.

• The second path involves a number of high profile GCC-based Islamic investment banks and their deployment of hundreds of millions of dollars in private equity and real estate developments in North America.

Read the full report for free at the link below.

Justin Dargin, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. wrote in Oil & Gas Financial Journal about the Islamization of project finance in the Gulf states saying that although Islamic financial instruments currently make up a small proportion of global finance, they actually experienced an annual 15% growth from 2005 to 2008, with the energy-producing Gulf nations in the Middle East responsible for much of the increase.

Islamic finance now reached the heavy industry of oil and gas, petrochemicals and manufacturing, with SABIC officially promoting it. However, regional Islamic banks are not widely involved in this business, only Al Rajhi and Bank AlJazira so far.

The conducted transactions may evidence a flight from the endlessly leveraged financial products that brought about the economic crisis to what is actually a more orthodox set of asset-backed and asset-based products, integral to Islamic finance. The author shows in the original article a substantial number of cases and details.