Things are starting to look good financially for Saudi Arabia again – very good. The de facto OPEC leader and world’s largest oil exporter said today it posted a budget surplus of 27.8 billion riyals (U.S. $7.4 billion) in the first quarter of the year. The Kingdom actually posted a budget deficit of 34.3 billion riyals in the first quarter of last year as the Saudi economy emerged from a recession in 2017, the first time the economy had shrunk since the global financial crisis nearly a decade earlier. According to its 2019 budget, Saudi Arabia plans to increase state spending by 7 percent this year in an effort to spur economic growth that was hurt by low oil prices late last year. Saudi finance minister Mohammed al-Jadaan told a conference in Riyadh on Wednesday that expenditure in the first quarter amounted to 217.6 billion, slightly higher when compared […]