Economy & Aid
Palestine's Al-Quds index fell 4.64 points from its 12 August high
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
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The Al-Quds index closed at 670.48 on Wednesday, 19 August, its lowest level this month and 4.64 points below the 675.12 it reached on 12 August.
The Palestine Exchange in Nablus publishes no data interface, and its own site does not answer automated requests, so every level here is carried with the date of the session it belongs to: 675.12 on 12 August, 673.70 on 16 August, 672.43 on 18 August, and 670.48 on 19 August.
The last of those was read from the previous-close field of the exchange's quote on Investing.com while Thursday's session was still trading.
The move is small — about seven tenths of one percent across the sessions that can be verified — and it comes after a month in which the index climbed back to where it stood before the war. Both of those facts belong in the same sentence.
What the market is pricing#
The exchange's listed companies published their half-year results this week, and the pattern Times of Palestine reported on 19 August was a divergence rather than a decline: Paltel and APIC grew their profits on regional and diversified revenue while the Palestinian Authority's own liquidity dried up.
That divergence is the market's central fact. A Palestinian listed company earns where it can trade; the Authority earns where Israel permits, and Israel collects roughly two-thirds of its public revenue and releases it at a rate it sets.
A market that keeps trading through this is not a sign that the fiscal crisis has eased. It is a sign that the listed economy and the public economy have partly detached from each other — the first can grow while the second cannot pay salaries.
Reading the number honestly#
These are facts about prices on given dates, not advice, and Times of Palestine does not tell anyone to buy or sell anything.
What the numbers do support is a narrow, useful observation for the reader: the Palestine Exchange has held its ground through a summer of tender announcements, clearance-revenue squeezes and a war that has not ended, and the drift of the past week is a drift, not a break.
The next thing worth watching is whether the September clearance transfer arrives at the capped rate or short of it. That, rather than any single session, is what moves the banks that sit at the top of this index.
