Over the past decade, Kuwait has experienced two major traumatic upheavals. While the invasion and subsequent war of liberation occupied the headlines of the world's press and television for many months after August 1990, a little-publicized collapse of an unofficial stock market in 1982 had threatened the very structure of the domestic economy and its financial system. This unregulated market had facilitated speculation to the point where, when the final crash came, the total debts outstanding between some two thousand operators on the market, had reached over 80 billion US$ dollars. These debts were almost all unsecured, and a settlement policy needed to be devised and introduced in such a way that the damage to the country's financial and commercial system was minimised. Dr Al-Yahyals book traces the pragmatic development of this policy and discusses its consequences over its years of evolution. He follows this with a first-hand account of the invasion and occupation having remained in the country during the whole of this period. In dealing with the two events in the same volume, he provides a basis for his final discussion of the possible future development path of the country's economy. This book should prove useful to those interested in stock market, regulation and in the oil economies of the Gulf, as well as those interested in accounts of the occupation from a first-hand point of view.