Shariah Compliant Mutual Funds Benefit From U.S. Financial Crisis

Commodity Online reported yesterday that one unanticipated effect of the current U.S. financial crisis is the growth of assets invested in Shariah mutual funds and other Shariah-compliant investments. Because Islamic law prohibits paying or receiving interest, most of the mutual funds have avoided the now-battered stocks of financial services firms. For the same reason, the funds also tend to avoid companies with large amounts of debt on their balance sheets. These companies are now less likely to be hurt by the credit freeze in the U.S.