I don’t know much about making money. I’m a journalist.
But this strikes me as a good investment opportunity. No, really.
Libya!
I hadn’t given the civil war there a thought, in terms of business opportunities. But that changed during an 80-mile commute up the freeway to Dubai.
A radio business guy was talking (hey, it was in English and the station signal was strong and I was trapped in a rental car) about how the sharps in construction, investment, development … were champing at the bit to get into a post-Qaddafi Libya.
Why? Because they think it’s going to be The Next Big Thing. Maybe even like the UAE has been for the past 20 years. Opportunities everywhere!
This actually makes some sense, when you follow this line of thinking.
–Libya has only 6.5 million people. A huge country with very few people. Basically empty. And seriously underdeveloped.
–Libya is about to have lots and lots of money because the place has enormous energy reserves. Like the UAE. It took someone as truly clueless as Muammar Qaddafi to figure out a way to keep his people poor with all that oil money to be had. (Still $100 a barrel, I do believe.)
–Unlike the UAE, Libya is “practically on Europe’s doorstep,” as one analyst put it, so this place could go nuts as 1) a sunny vacation destination for Euros and 2) a retirement-home destination. Check the map. Look at all that Mediterranean Sea coastline! How many seafront villas do you think could be built between Tripoli and Benghazi? A million? And we will need hotels, of course. And roads. And other infrastructure.
Anyway, doesn’t this make sense? That the next hot development country (as long as the next government is stable) … will be Libya? If I had a bunch of money to invest, and expected to be around long enough to recoup, yeah, I’d buy some Libyan beachfront property.
The radio guy was talking about how even before the revolution/civil war, the development lads had been commuting to Libya, in that short period between the normalization of relations between Qaddafi’s Libya and the West. (Basically, 2010.) Then when the shooting began, they all got the heck out … and now are hovering at airports around the region, waiting for the new guys in charge to start letting contracts.
Remember, Abu Dhabi and Dubai were a couple of patches on the sand 30 years ago. And in a lot of ways Libya has more things going for it, especially in terms of geography.
Just sayin’. Take it for what it’s worth — an investment tip from a journalist.
1 response so far ↓
1 trent walsh // Apr 18, 2012 at 10:25 AM
It makes a lot of sense what you wrote. I too am looking for an investment on Libya’s coat but I don’t expect a great return on my investment for years if not decades to come.
See, the world is fixated on other “golden” opportunities such as Asia. But having visited Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand the weather is unbearable for most months. Humidity and heat is unbearable.
But since the hot money is there, expect advertising to be pumping those places. That alone, is why I like Libya, cheap compared to Europe but with a nice European climate.
I can’t remember where I once saw in The Economist magazine about 3 years ago an ad for townhouses on their coast. I kick myself for not having kept it.
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