When Nahed Taher received her Phd from the UK’s Lancaster University in 2001 and returned home to work in the Saudi banking sector, the logical conclusion of her thesis was somewhat revolutionary for the local banks: oil revenues are a problem.

Banks were having a negative impact on the GDP, she argued at the time, with years of oil revenues turning the banking system into a retail lending machine that encouraged consumption, not savings. These imbalances were hampering industrial development, halving the country’s per capita GDP in two decades.