Thursday, February 7

Unease voiced over Islamic bonds

The FT has now picked this up that the Islamic bonds called as Sukuk are not really Islamic. But that's an oxymoron, anybody who seens the return on these bonds and compares them to the yieldcurve, does a correlation will simply see that its just interest based, just not called as interest.

Very worrisome, some form of equity participation has to be built into these structures otherwise this entire market will collapse. Also see the commentary around the standardisation problem. Remember that if they standardise the definitions of riba and Islamic Finance globally, then they have standardised, for the first time across the board, a single view of what one part of Islam theology says. That, in turn, will really be interesting.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

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