Stephen Kalin

And so it doesn't really seem to be in the interest of these Gulf states.

Yeah, so it's really been just an acceleration of those changes that Elliott and others have been documenting for the last couple of years.

But also, just in the past few weeks, there have been more cuts to projects that are part of NEOM, this huge city-state in the northwest of the country.

Just a few weeks ago, several contracts were canceled for a $5 billion dam that was already 30% finished.

But also in the capital, in Riyadh, there were plans that were announced for a massive new downtown project centered on this enormous cube building that the Saudis said could hold the equivalent of 20 Empire State Buildings.

They started the works on that last year, and we actually drove past the construction site and could see

some of that leveling that had been going on, but that's all been paused as well.

That's right.

It was just a few months ago that the Crown Prince made a visit to the White House.

And President Trump, when he visited Riyadh last year, said that the Saudis had committed $600 billion.

MBS, when he was in Washington, said he was going to up that to a trillion dollars.

And these are just enormous figures that

they're now reconsidering given how much of a crunch there is on their own finances.

And Saudi is also, of course, a big investor across the region.

They've made promises to help rebuild in Syria after the fall of Bashar al-Assad just over a year ago.

And so as the largest economy in the Arab world, we could see cuts in spending in other areas across the region.

Yeah, Saudi was very fortunate to have that pipeline.

It's still pumping out a million barrels a day at elevated prices.

But the problem essentially was that the Crown Princess Plan announced 10 years ago foresaw spending on a massive scale, which was going to require spending by the Saudi government, but also foreign investment.

So to begin with, the Saudi government doesn't have enough money to spend on all these projects.