Market participants in the Mideast are excited about the prospects for regional growth and economic development.

Clients are “structurally very constructive and confident on GCC economies and markets,” BofA’s Michael Hartnett said, in this week’s installment of his popular weekly “Flow Show” series. There’s “no stopping” the region’s “social, economic and financial ‘transformation.'”

If you’re inclined to a wry chuckle (or a despairing sigh), you’ll be forgiven. We’re talking about a collection of absolute monarchies which, beneath the gilded veneer and behind the curtain of who’s who development conferences, are the same cartoonishly patriarchal, repressive regimes they’ve always been.

Mohammed bin Salman can buy all the golfers and pay off all the soccer stars he wants, and who knows, maybe he’ll manage to get his Jetsons city built one day, but one thing won’t change: A Saudi dissident is a dead man walking. Just like a wayward Emirati princess is a prisoner in her own home. These are brutal, socially backward autocracies.

Even if, as a top banker, you want to ignore that, the hypocrisy inherent in placating princes and emirs who funnel huge sums of money and provide other kinds of material support to Sunni extremist groups, while allocating vast resources internally to ensure compliance with labyrinthine regulations designed to curb terror financing is rivaled only by the hypocrisy on display by the Western governments who craft those regulations when they engage diplomatically and sell weapons to the same princes and emirs.

I’m no justice crusader, and I’m among the most cold-hearted, fatalistic realists you’ll ever come across. But if I were the CEO of a major US bank (or a decision maker at a private equity colossus), I’d quit before I’d embark on a desert pilgrimage to flatter a collection of iron-fisted monarchs who’d gleefully torture me if I’d chosen investigative journalism or human rights as a career path instead of banking (or slap me in the mouth if I were a woman who looked at them wrong).

It’s easy enough to shun Iran. Political realities mean there aren’t a lot of great opportunities there. But how many US banks and private equity funds have announced plans to pause dealings or sever ties with Qatar since October 7? That’s a rhetorical question.

Coming full circle, BofA’s Hartnett went on to say that clients in the region are confident that the GCC “has the best government balance sheets in the world [and a] policy desire for the region to win in alternative energy, fin tech and virtual assets.” The GCC, local investors say, “can plan for tomorrow’s growth” because “democracies can only react to today’s crises.”

Maybe — and I’m just tossing this out there — democracies wouldn’t have to spend so much time reacting to “today’s crises” if the Sunni monarchies would stop facilitating them.