Nonresident Senior Fellow, Global Energy Center, Atlantic Council
Jean-François Seznec is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center. He is also an adjunct professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and School of Foreign Service. He co-authored, with Samer Mosis, the book The Financial Markets of the Arab Gulf: Power, Politics and Money, published by Routledge. Previously, Seznec was a visiting associate professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. He also taught at Columbia University for two decades. Seznec is the founder and managing director of the Lafayette Group LLC, a U.S.-based private investment company. He has 25 years of experience in international banking and finance of which 10 years were spent in the Middle East, including six years in Bahrain as a banker. Seznec has a PhD, an MA, and an MPhil in political science from Yale University, and an MA in international affairs from Columbia University. He has a BA in international affairs from Washington College.
In this panel, speakers draw on their extensive knowledge of the region’s markets to explain how modern financial mechanisms have acted as a buffer between Gulf societies at large and the newfound cash reserves of Gulf Arab states over the last 50 years.
As part of its energy series, AGSIW hosted a roundtable discussion with Jim Krane, the Wallace S. Wilson fellow for Energy Studies at Rice University’s Baker Institute.
The arrests of 11 princes and numerous prominent political and business personalities in Saudi Arabia this week might best be described as a frontal attack on the existing order of business among Saudi elites.
Saudi Arabia is the largest exporter of oil in the world, one of only three producers able to sustain production around 10 million barrels per day (b/d) and the only oil producer that can increase production by 2 million b/d rapidly.
