RIYADH: The annual inflation rate in the US hit 6 percent in October, its highest level since the 1990s.
The London-based company does not share the bleak opinion that this high level will correspond to negative returns such as was the case in the 1970s.
Secondly, since inflation is set to be around 3 percent, this will still prompt the Federal Reserve to introduce further monetary tightening.
The third channel through which the 3 percent inflation will inhibit stock market returns is through the rise in equity risk premium, which is currently low.
The Commerce Department said on Tuesday that the current account deficit, which measures the flow of goods, services and investments into and out of the country, accelerated 8.3 percent to $214.8 billion last quarter.
The project will be implemented in two phases, with the first ending in 2025 at a cost of about $1.6 billion.
According to a report issued by the National Center for Industrial and Mining Information, the food industry took the major chunk of the licenses with 14 permits, followed by the chemicals industry with nine.
The speaker, which syncs with the tech shopping giant’s virtual assistant Alexa, now communicates not only in generic Saudi Arabic but in the Hejazi dialect of Jeddah, the Najdi dialect of Riyadh and the Khaleeji dialect of Dammam and the eastern Gulf.
Amazon’s Alexa voice services division has a Riyadh-based team that helps third-party companies provide Echo users with easy access to broadcasters such as MBC and Fatafeat, to music streaming services such as Anghami, or events such as Riyadh Season.
At the end of the second quarter of last year, Amazon had a 42 percent share of the smart speaker market, with Google at 37 percent and Apple at 21 percent, according to tech research company Omdia.
Smart speakers hit the headlines in 2019 when it surfaced that the tech giants who make them use computers as well as thousands of people around the world to listen in on conversations customers have with their devices.
Fatani convinced the senior management of Amazon to focus on Saudi Arabia by pointing out that there were thousands of Echo users in the Kingdom even before the device was available in Arabic.