By THOMAS ERDBRINK November 5, 2016 TEHRAN — In the past, Iranians looking to mock the United States would burn cardboard effigies of Uncle Sam or Lady Liberty. But in recent months, as the American presidential election took a series of bizarre turns, Iranians seeking to make fun of the “Great Satan” have ditched the arts and crafts and simply switched on their TV sets. Iran’s state television, a […]
|By Matein Khalid| The fall in oil prices since 2014 has triggered a liquidity crunch and higher funding costs in the UAE banking system. EIBOR is almost double the London interbank rate LIBOR. Non-performing loan (NPL) have begun to rise as property prices have fallen 20% from their peak and corporate/SME borrowers are hit by a sharp downturn in the business cycle. DIB shares reflect these macro […]
By Sankalp Phartiyal and Anya George Tharakan | MUMBAI/BENGALURU MUMBAI/BENGALURU Infosys Ltd cut its annual revenue growth target for the second time in three months as India’s software service exporters feel the pinch of major Western clients holding back on spending as they wait to see how November’s U.S. presidential election and Europe’s Brexit drama play out. While it reported second-quarter net profit grew 6.1 percent, the […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| Saudi Arabia said it was holding investor meetings in London, Los Angeles, Boston and New York from Wednesday to sell benchmark bonds maturing in five, 10 and 30 years. The issue is expected to be at least $10 billion. “It’s very good timing,” Bloomberg quoted Angelo Rossetto, a trader at GMSA Investments Ltd. in London, as saying. “I wouldn’t say now or never as […]
The Interpreter By AMANDA TAUB It is a truth universally acknowledged by every war correspondent, humanitarian aid worker and Western diplomat: Some wars, like Syria’s, receive tremendous public attention, which can translate into pressure for resolution. But many others, like Yemen’s still raging but much ignored conflict, do not. Some of the reasons are obvious; the scale of Syria’s war is catastrophic and much worse than Yemen’s. […]
By PETER BAKER September 30, 2016 JERUSALEM — From across the ocean and across the Green Line, they came on Friday to the mountaintop sanctuary of Mount Herzl to bid farewell to Shimon Peres, marking what one called the “end of the era of giants.” But the question of the moment was whether it was a funeral for a man or for his dream. Twenty-three years after Mr. Peres […]
By MARK LANDLER September 30, 2016 WASHINGTON — When Bill Clinton took his place on Friday at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem for the state funeral of Shimon Peres, he was part of a tangled tableau: leaders from Israel and the United States who came together to mourn a giant of peace but who nurse their own political feuds and rivalries, stretching back two decades. Standing close to the former […]
|By Matein Khalid| The Federal Reserve did not disappoint the financial markets after Janet Yellen’s FOMC conference on Wednesday. The US central bank did not raise the overnight borrowing (or Fed Funds rate) to 0.5% on the eve of the November election. This triggered a wild rally in the US stock market with the Dow Jones up 163 points, gold up to $1342 and oil to $46 […]
By PETER BAKER and RANA F. SWEIS September 20, 2016 AMMAN, Jordan — At the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood, Ali Abu al-Sukkar’s telephone would not stop ringing Tuesday. It was Election Day, the first time the Islamist organization had taken part after nearly a decade of boycotts, and Mr. Sukkar found himself in demand. The deputy secretary general of the Islamic Action Front, the brotherhood’s political wing, Mr. Sukkar listed the […]
|By Matein Khalid| When Ben Bernanke uttered the word “taper” in May 2013, he triggered a bloodbath in emerging markets and a free fall in “fragile five” currencies that included the Indian rupee and the Indonesian rupiah. However, Asian equities markets, while not immune to a Fed rate hike, are far better positioned for higher US dollar interest rates than in 2013, let alone 2007 or 1998. […]
President Obama arrived in New York City on Sunday evening for three days that will mix election-year politics with a farewell to the world stage at the United Nations. But the visit comes against a suddenly tense backdrop, after a powerful explosion rocked a Manhattan street and a man claiming fealty to the Islamic State stabbed several people in a Minnesota shopping mall. The president’s diplomatic schedule […]
By Mark Hosenball and Joseph Menn | WASHINGTON/SAN FRANCISCO WASHINGTON/SAN FRANCISCO The Federal Bureau of Investigation is intensifying efforts to find enough evidence to enable the Justice Department to indict some of the Russians that U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded are hacking into American political parties and figures, U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials said on Thursday. Building legal cases is difficult, largely because the best evidence […]
|By Matein Khalid|I had written a column two weeks ago outlining my view that US equities faced a dangerous autumn and the S&P 500 index was set for a fall of 150 points. However, even I did not expect the S&P500 index to fall 52 points on Friday (the Dow dropped 394 points and NASDAQ 133 points), its worst performance since the Brexit shock. It was even […]
/By Matein Khalid/The oil market has been a rollercoaster in 2016. A global financial panic triggered by China’s yuan depreciation caused Brent crude to fall below $30 a barrel in late January. I was amazed at the sheer scale of the speculative short positions accumulated by oil traders and hedge funds in both West Texas and Brent futures markets, the highest since the oil crash of 2008. The […]
/By Matien Khalid/I have been bullish on emerging market debt as an asset class since last autumn. Even though the Chinese yuan devaluation was toxic, this asset class is up 12% in 2016, thanks to almost $5 billion in cash inflows. The tax amnesty in Indonesia, the political changes in Brazil after President Dilma’s impeachment, the election of a center-right pro-business government and $16 billion sovereign debt […]
Biologists studying a small, colorful fish in the Mediterranean Sea have discovered a new way in which a female can choose the best father for her offspring. The animal kingdom is full of elaborate traits and behaviors by which females choose mates. Even in species in which the female mates with multiple males, biologists have found evidence of “cryptic female choice” involving mechanisms in the reproductive tract […]
Users like the convenience of Google’s Drive suite of applications, but the Docs, Sheets and Slides apps haven’t received high ratings from mobile users, especially when it comes to using them to make tables and charts. However, an update to the Docs, Sheets and Slides apps for Android released this week aims to make them easier to use than ever. For instance, when users copy a body […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| Marya Group, headquartered in Abu Dhabi, announced an increase to its investment portfolio, bringing the total invested to more than $ 1 billion. Marya Group focuses on making private and public equity investments in cash-generating business with strong fundamentals across core economic sectors that are resilient: education, health care, food and beverage processing as well as real estate. Its investments are centered on […]
A magnifying glass is held in front of a computer screen in this picture illustration taken in Berlin May 21, 2013. Reuters/Pawel Kopczynski/Illustration/File Photo SYDNEY Australia has set up a cyber-intelligence unit to identify terrorism financing, money laundering and financial fraud online, the government said on Tuesday, because of “unprecedented” threats to national security. The measure expands on a major platform of conservative Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, […]
A general view of a Wal-Mart store in Mexico City, April 24, 2012. Reuters/Edgard Garrido/Files Wal-Mart Stores Inc (WMT.N), vying to better challenge Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O), will pay about $3 billion for internet retailer Jet.com and its innovative pricing software in the largest-ever deal for an e-commerce startup. The deal disclosed on Monday follows a five-year e-commerce acquisition spree in which Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest traditional retailer, […]
DUBAI // An American television network has been criticised by UAE residents after one of its anchors cited a report that Gems schools, based in Dubai, funded jihad. The comments, aired on a Fox Business Network show hosted by British-American Stuart Varney, were taken from a report from US political website The Daily Caller. Fox reiterated that the views were not that of the channel but of […]
LEBANON. Byblos Bank issued today, in cooperation with the Olayan School of Business at the American University of Beirut, the results of the Byblos Bank/AUB Consumer Confidence Index for the second quarter of 2016. The results show that the Byblos Bank/AUB Consumer Confidence Index improved by 5.3% in each of April and May, while it regressed by 1% in June 2016. The Index averaged 36.1 in the […]
WASHINGTON — A cash payment of $400 million delivered to Iran in January became part of the presidential campaign on Wednesday, as Donald J. Trump seized on the money transfer as a sign of what he called the administration’s failed foreign policy — prompting a forceful White House rejection. Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said the payment to Iran was part of the resolution of […]
A general view shows the headquarters of the Federal Security Service (FSB) (L) in central Moscow, Russia, November 10, 2015. Reuters/Sergei Karpukhin MOSCOW Russia’s intelligence service said on Saturday that the computer networks of 20 organizations, including state agencies and defense companies, have been infected with spyware in what it described as a targeted and coordinated attack. The Federal Security Service, the FSB, said the malware and […]
