Economic versus financial integration or decoupling between the US and the GCC

Although the two biggest economies of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), namely the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, are not economically affected by the business cycles in the US, financial interactions are a different story. In this article, we show that while the GCC economies have decoupled from that of the US, the stock markets in them are very much in synchronization with the fluctuations in the US stock market.