an even brighter future together. Thank you for your attention and for being here with us in this forum. [Music] What a momentum. Thank you, your excellency, for opening the Saudi US Investment Forum with such a powerful forwardlooking address, setting the stage for a dynamic day of dialogue and opportunity, highlighting also the strength and depth of the Saudi US partnership. And now ladies and gentlemen, as we move forward, today's program will feature leaders and change makers shaping global economic landscape from innovation to investment, energy to finance. We have each session designed to spark ideas, forge and foster collaboration, and drive progress. And with that, it's time to begin our first panel of the day. striking balance, coordinating fiscal and monetary action. To navigate this timely and important discussion, please join me in welcoming our esteemed moderator, Dena Powell McCormick, president of PTT and MSD Partners, and her distinguished panelist. Welcome, Dena. The stage is yours. [Music] [Music] Good [Music] morning. Good morning. It's such a privilege for me to be here this morning and to moderate this next panel. Your excellencies, your royal highnesses, your highnesses. I was here eight years ago for the first summit with President Trump. King Salman and his Royal Highness. And as Minister Alfella just said, you could feel history in the making. when King Salman and his Royal Highness hosted President Trump in King Abdul Aziz's historic home and we saw the beautiful memories of the historic visit of President FDR. I realized this next period of time is really meaningful for this bilateral relationship and that proved to be true. The next two speakers that I get to invite are also friends of mine. They're incredible leaders in finance and today their respective roles as finance minister of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Treasury Secretary of the United States could not be more consequential. Ladies and gentlemen, His Excellency Minister Eljadan, Finance Minister of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, Secretary Scott Bessant. [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome. Thank you. Such a privilege, as I said, to be with you both this morning. Your excellency, thank you for hosting us. Thank you for putting on this extraordinary summit with his excellency, Minister Alfella. You and I had the privilege of working together eight years ago on some of the ex extremely important partnerships and business deliverables. And we're really excited to have Secretary Bessant with us, fresh off a flight from Geneva. Um I'm gonna start with you, Mr. Secretary, you have had quite a few weeks um and a very important meeting in Geneva, a series of meetings with the Chinese counterparts and success. Uh it sounds like we you have made huge progress uh in the relationship and the next 90 days are going to prove to be critical. Can you share a little bit more about the deal, how the talks went and what you think will happen in the next 90 days? Good. Well, thank you, Dina, excellency. Uh, first of all, I'm going to say it's wonderful to be here. Um, I have a long history with the kingdom. The governor of South Carolina, where I'm from, John West, was the ambassador to the kingdom under President Jimmy Carter. He was a close family friend. So, I grew up hearing stories about the kingdom as a child. And then my first proper job in New York City was working for the Oleon Group. Uh so uh I I have a long history uh with Saudi and uh before we go on too I I do want to have a hat tip to our moderator here. Uh Dina Powell is the personification of the perfect internal and external priv and private person in the United States. Thank you. her her family moved from the Middle East to Texas. She attended the University of Texas. She's had had a major role in the first Trump administration and now for now for now uh she's on the outside. So, thank you. I'm honored. Thank you, Mr. Secretary. Really appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you so much. And uh yes, so we had a very active dialogue in Geneva this weekend. It was very constructive. Both sides came with a clear agenda, shared interest. We had great mutual respect. And I think uh what we were able to establish a as President Trump and the administration began the tariff program, we had a plan, we had a process and what we did not have with the Chinese was a mechanism. So, you know, we uh the vice premier and I now call this the Geneva mechanism uh to prevent any misunderstandings because uh President Trump and party chairman Xi uh have a very good relationship but the relationship uh did not uh make its way down through other levels of government. So I think the important thing is that after this weekend we have a mechanism to avoid escalation like we had before. Uh we both agreed to bring the tariffs levels down 115%. Which I think is very productive because where we were with 145 and 125 was the equivalent of an unintended embargo. uh that is not healthy for the two largest economies in the world. It is not healthy for the rest of the world. So I I think we can proceed from here. We have a very good framework and um my as I said during IMF week in Washington about 3 or 4 weeks ago, there is a possibility. it it's not a certainty, but that as Ray Dalio might say, we could do a big beautiful rebalancing. President Trump wants to rebalance the American economy back to a manufacturing economy with high precision manufacturing. I think everyone agrees including Chinese leadership that they need to rebalance towards more of a consumption and consumer economy and the dream scenario would be if somehow we could do that together. And what do you think the next 90 days look like? It sounds like uh very productive meetings and now uh people talking to each other as you say. Um were there areas that you kind of put to the side or you know really put everything on the table? I I think everything is on the table. We have a very good framework from President Trump's first administration. Uh there was a treaty that was signed uh a trade treaty, a trade agreement that was signed in January 2020. So we're we're not starting from ground zero. Uh we have a framework and we can go from there. Obviously many things have changed over the past five years and look what we what we don't want and both sides agreed uh we do not want a generalized decoupling between the two largest economies in the world. What we want is the the US is going to decouple in strategic industries which we saw during co we had become woefully uh non-self-sufficient and so whether it's medicine semiconductors u you know other other strategic areas so the the United States will bring those industries home but the idea isn't a generalized decoupling and we do have a very large trade deficit with China that could be solved in many ways and my hope it is uh via Chinese buying more American goods and the US selling the a kind of opening up of the Chinese consumer and then that will lead to more fair and balanced trade. One last question on trade. Um, President Trump has tasked you and Ambassador um, Greer and Secretary Lutnik uh, to look at other countries and hopefully have other deals like you did with the UK. Um, do you feel good about several of those also coming through in the next period of time? Uh, yes. So, I I've been focused on the Asia deals of which obviously China is the largest. We've had very productive discussions with Japan. South Korea is going through a governmental change, but uh before they went into the election cycle, the South Koreans came with very good proposals. Uh Indonesia who's a large trading large trading partner uh has been very forthcoming. The island of Taiwan has presented very good proposals. Thailand. So think things on on my side of the world things are going very well. I I think the US and Europe may be a bit slower. My personal belief is Europe may have a collective action problem that the the Italians want something that's different than the French, but I I'm sure at the end of the day we will reach a satisfactory conclusion. Great. Thank you. So your excellency, I we were talking backstage about 2017 when really not many people in the world had heard about vision 2030 and in eight pretty short years it's really remarkable to see all that the kingdom has done in social, economic and political reform. You have been a key leader in diversifying the Saudi economy in bringing investment here to the kingdom. give us sort of in your view the status of vision 2030 and the unique partnership between our two economies. Well, thank you very much and thank you Mr. Secretary um for being here and for really insightful thoughts. I before I answer the question, I just wanted to comment on his excellency's um comments in Washington. I actually pushed his excellency a little bit more than what I would usually in the IMFC meetings. Um and actually there was a lot of wisdom in the room and there was really it gave me a lot of hope and I actually spoke about it publicly saying that what I've heard in Washington and particularly his excellency gives me a lot of confidence that the world is not as in a chaos or in a difficult situation as a lot of people are seeing it. I think there's a plan and hopefully we will see a resolution and we started seeing this. So thank you um Mr. Secretary and Dina thank you also for all the support that you provided to the relationship. Um the Saudi US relationship is as his excellency Khad Farah mentioned is 92 plus years old and it gets stronger and stronger every year and if you just look at the amount of investments um and from Saudi in the US it's really significant compared to the size of an economy like Saudi Arabia. um it's way like actually multiple folds of any other nation i.e any other nation we invest in and the same the other way there are a lot of investments um from the US uh in Saudi Arabia and particularly since the uh start of Saudi vision 2030 we have seen actually a significant pickup Saudi vision 2030 and I'm sure a lot of the attendees here are aware of what Saudi vision 2030 but in brief it's really a long-term vision, a north star that actually for the last 78 years drove significant part of the society if not all part of the society towards one goal which is transforming this nation economically, socially and financially uh to a more sustainable path. um we were significantly reliant on one commodity for an extended period of time which was um basically so volatile. So you have the booms and busts in the economic cycles depending on where the oil prices and that was not sustainable. So when you have a leadership that actually sets a very clear vision, mobilize the nation behind it, um people of Saudi Arabia then really owns it and they see that actually this is their vision. This is their country. This is their transformation. That's what happened. What happened um in the last seven eight years is incredible in a lot of ways. And I'll give just few examples. I mean if you look at some of the very difficult structural changes that requires quite an extended period of time um private investment as a percentage of GDP I mean this is a structural um anchor in any economy and to shift it to increase it takes really ages and decades sometimes um we had a more than 50% growth in um the private sector investment as a percentage of GDP from 16 short of 16 to about 23% now that is significant this is a long-term investment the capital formation is significant unemployment we have in the last quarter the lowest unemployment in Saudi history ever 3.5% and amongst the nationals amongst the Saudis we have achieved our target for 2030 30 last quarter which is 7%. Um women empowerment is significant. Um so bringing half of half of your society to the productive part of the economy is significant and and that drove um a serious serious change. you know, moving from 17% of women participation in in the workforce to 36% is is a serious structural change. Um, I could go on but if you look at even just I'll leave you with one note in the tourism which basically then uh connects to mobility and logistics etc. tourism. We had a target of 100 million um uh visits as per the tourism international organization um for 2030. We achieved that 2 years ago. Mhm. Um simply because there were a lot of attractions um in Saudi and then the nationals did not have to travel abroad. they then which you know has significant expansion of local tourism in addition to inbound tourism. So a lot is happening in the context of I mean just reminded by um our discussion back stage um in few weeks back when we met in Miami. Mhm. Um, we talked about what is really happening in Saudi and what kind of investment and investors are we attracting and we touched on the family offices, families and founders and that is significant and I think having that kind of discussion and just showcasing what is happening in Saudi Arabia to the individuals in the US is critical and I think it's an area where we are focusing on Hazard having touched on on some of this in his speech. You know, it was so interesting because most of the capital so far has been institutional in nature and we're seeing at BDT and MSD partners a number of our families eager to come to the kingdom, eager to actually work with the Oolon family and the Saudi families here as well. Uh so that there is this shift that I'm seeing or not a shift, maybe an addition of capital, an addition of capital. Um Mr. Secretary, you most of your life were an investor and in fact you were known as one of the greatest investors of your generation. You uh saw a few global trends before other people did made some big bets. Part of that definitionally means you know how to manage volatile markets. You recently said we should be prepared for some bumpiness as we try to reimagine the US economy. And there are three pillars you have talked about which is reimagining trade um enacting the tax cuts that President Trump started in 2017 and deregulation. Can you just talk a little bit more about those three? Uh yes. And and I I would also say uh just to reiterate the the strength of the the US Saudi relationship uh that my I believe it was my second or third day at my desk. I went around the world and my first two calls in the evening was to the finance minister in Tokyo. Then the following morning was to his excellency. So that shows the the priorities of the US government. Uh this will be President Trump's uh first trip. This would have been President Trump's first trip abroad if not for the death of the Pope. Uh this will be his first state visit. Um what we are attempting to do in the US is to further create it as the world's premier investment destination and the Trump economic agenda is really consists of three parts. Thus far we have seen trade which has gotten most of the publicity and President Trump wants to reorder the US engagement with other countries and I will tell you that the tariffs the non-tariff trade barriers currency manipulation and uh subsidies of labor and capital are coming down quickly. So I am optimistic that on trade we could actually see more frictionless trade globally. Uh the second part of the agenda which is moving better than I would have expected and as a newcomer to Washington I would say that it was my highest level of anxiety was the tax bill. Uh the 2017 Tax Cuts and Job Act was not passed until December, just before Christmas of President Trump's uh first year. I believe that we will have it passed this summer. And we will make the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent. We will add more features that are very friendly to capital. We're going to bring back 100% expensing. If you build a factory uh if you build a factory in the US, you can expense it immediately. If you the equipment for that factory can be expensed in the first year and we think that that will be very powerful. That was the most powerful aspect of driving growth and jobs uh during President Trump's first term. And I believe that the permanent so we will no longer be talking about tax cuts once this bill becomes permanent. This will be the law of the land uh for the US and there will be great certainty on the tax side. And then the third side is deregulation. And I think really the when I when I look at the kingdom, when I look at the US, the one thing I see is great optimism and a can do attitude. We've seen it in states. The the US we have a federal system stateto state. We've seen it in states like Texas, which has a very much a can do attitude. Florida, we're seeing big migrations there. And what President Trump wants to do is make the rest of the United States more like Texas and Florida where deregulation is down, permitting time is down. You know what what's the what's the use of saying we're going to be an AI superpower if the permitting takes 3 years? What's the use of saying we want to expand our energy dominance if you can't get pipelines through? uh so we are going to deregulate substantially. It is also very good for inflation for the American households because uh during President Trump's first term what really generated the non-inflationary growth was there was a demand shock from the tax bill and from that stimulus it was met with a supply response from deregulation and you ended up with very strong non-inflationary growth. I think what happened under the Biden administration was you had a demand shock from government spending and if we have time we could come back to how we're going to get that down but it was met with supply constriction and that's how we got the great inflation of 21 22 and 23. So we are really setting the stage with the trade tax and deregulation for what we think could be a very will be a very strong period of non-inflationary strong growth. Thank you and thank you for plugging uh Texas where I grew up but Pennsylvania is very strong too. P P Pennsylvania is on its way. Um I'm going to give the last word to your his excellency. I can't believe we're already out of time. Um, tell us what you think are the biggest opportunities, finance and economic opportunities, job creation opportunities both in the kingdom and in the United States between our two countries. Well, there is this requires another two hours. Dina, I mean, there are a lot to be honest. There are a lot um that can be done. Um I think the US is the envy and has been the envy of the world in terms of the entrepreneurship spirit, innovation and technology and you could see that in the productivity um amongst possibly uh every country in the G20 US stands out in terms of the growth and productivity. Um that's an area where we are focusing on and and trying to see where we can actually utilize that kind of expertise in the US to fuel the Saudi economy. We have um as few um international commentators said this is possibly a very bright spot in the intern if you look at the international map in terms of where the growth is. It's a young population. It's a technology savvy population. It's a government that is willing to move. It's a government that does not have an ego to change when they think things are not moving in the right direction and very agile and I think we have this common um uh features that I think can we can from both sides benefit from. I would encourage seriously I would encourage investors who are not familiar uh with what is happening in Saudi to actually just have that opportunity to come and visit Saudi Arabia, meet with the um Saudi investors and even the young population to see how really very much positive thinking driven this population is. Terrific. Thank you. Thank you both so much for an excellent panel and for starting off the summit so well. We're so grateful. Thank you. Thank you. [Music] Standing. Thank you. You guys are great. Dina. Hello. Hello. Hey, Sarah. We're We're excited for