If you are really opposed to the Saudi regime, I'd posit that the most effective thing you could do is create a bullshit startup and get them to invest, and then frivolously waste their money.
Yeah, that sounds like a great idea to employ against a regime perfectly willing to violently murder people.
Anyway, levity aside regimes that will violently murder to silence critics might not to get even for bad business investments.
As for me I'm hoping to get some investment on my new grocery list tracking app that uses machine learning on the blockchain to automatically buy what you want to eat before you know what it is!
I don't really disagree with that but at the same time it doesn't really feel all that wise to whack a hornet's nest with a baseball bat. If anyone feels like taking the risk, then I wish them the best of luck in swindling them for as much as they can get away with, but playing stupid games can lead to winning stupid prizes.
Block that and KSA will fall apart within months as having hundreds of thousands of dollars means nothing if there's no access to Gucci purses and houses in London.
Instead, we see a slow progress which is painful, but may be the best that can be hoped for.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-women-drivers-face-one-la...
It hasn't been attempted. Kim Jong-un, for example, has been raised in Switzerland, dito for MANY children of autocracies, dictatorships and other detestable regimes from all over the world. Their blood money (or, in earlier times their blood diamonds) was, is and always will be welcome for Western banks.
If France and/or the UK put anyone with "Al-Saud" in their last name on a no entry list, MBS would be gone in weeks.
This type of cynical, defeatist attitude is part of the problem.
We always don’t. That’s how some countries end up under sanctions. (In any case, this is a bad moral defense.)
I'd say when both make it convenient to do so, or one makes it an overwhelming necessity.
All 19 hijackers of 911 attacks were Saudis. We have sanctioned many countries and murdered 100,000 innocent children and civils in last Iraq war that most americans still don’t know the reason we invaded, yet Suadis remain off the radar. Now the greencard holder got in altercation at the embassy and ended up treated with bonesaw, meanwhile POTUS tells we invested 1B in their contracts so we have to be careful what we say. On the top of that he has multiple private businesses at the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars at stake with Saudis. Tell me again about some sanctions against them, please?
>There are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen
The house of saud can't be on the top of the throne forever. Their monopoly on oil is diminishing (as is the importance of oil) and they don't have anything else even remotely comparative.
You could have predicted that nothing would happen to the Assyrians for 16 thousand years and you would only be wrong once, but that was the one time it did matter. You could have predicted it about the romans for a thousand years; about the soviets for 70 years; about the third reich for 15; iraq for 40. In the end they all fell.
Now, I am not saying that this won't blow over in a month, just that it is really difficult to predict the future, especially in international relations.
Saudi may kill my journalists, but at least they subsidize my lunch.
The parallels in the two cases are striking.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitsky_Act
[2] - https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/death-sergei-magnitsky-bil...
This sounds like a long-term con that would take years to implement - sovereign wealth funds are more into late-stage pre-IPO rounds and not as much into $5k AngelList syndicate rounds.
For short-term reducing personal dependence on oil sounds like a good start.
We are very close to the ability to use bonds to pay for goods instead of cash. This allows you to buy things with "strings attached" so the bond becomes valueless under certain circumstances. E.g., I will buy your eggs, with a $8 bond which will lose its value if you are proved within my network of trust to have paid a worker less than a living wage.
Of course this $8 bond is worth less than $8 in cash, but the eggs purchased with the bond are worth more to me than eggs purchased with cash.
This will enable people to spend money and ensure that their revenues are reinvested according to their values.
This is one of my candidates for a "killer app" for Ethereum.
This is absolutely necessary as a key check on dirty money, since cryptocurrency has dramatically loosened up the ability for cash to flow between regulatory regimes.