Bank shares have been the runaway winners of the post-election U.S. stock market boom as investors wagered that higher interest rates, lighter regulation, lower taxes and faster economic growth would boost profits for lenders. Up 32 percent since the election of Donald Trump, the S&P 500’s bank index .SPXBK has outpaced the wider market’s gain by roughly 3-to-1. Now, however, a changing dynamic in the bond market […]
The Wikum interface provides readers with detailed summaries of online discussions. Credit: Jason Dorfman/MIT CSAIL From Reddit to Quora, discussion forums can be equal parts informative and daunting. We’ve all fallen down rabbit holes of lengthy threads that are impossible to sift through. Comments can be redundant, off-topic or even inaccurate, but all that content is ultimately still there for us to try and untangle. Sick of […]
SEOUL Opponents of South Korea’s ousted leader, Park Geun-hye, demanded on Saturday that she be arrested a day after she was thrown out of office over a corruption scandal involving the country’s conglomerates. Park’s critics said they would rally in central Seoul, where they have been gathering every weekend for months, while the former president’s conservative supporters also planned protests, raising the risk of confrontation. The Constitutional […]
Given the amount of Panameras you see on the roads here, you have to conclude that Porsche’s luxury family-moving saloon was a sizeable driver in the company’s significant rise in sales in the region last year. How heavily environmental concerns weighed on buyers’ minds while handing over their hard-earned cash – or if anybody at all decided against it in favour of holding out for an all-wheel […]
When Rex Tillerson visits Japan and South Korea next week, the new US secretary of state will not escape the whispers back home: the former ExxonMobil chief executive has been all but invisible since arriving in Washington. In his first weeks as the top US diplomat, the Texan has been conspicuously low-profile. His silence has fuelled concerns that President Donald Trump intends to downgrade diplomacy — and […]
Saudi Arabia’s is set to narrow during 2017 on the back of higher oil prices, discipline in spending and non-oil revenue measures, according to a new research note by Bank of America Merrill Lynch. BofA Merrill Lynch said it sees the 2017 budget deficit at SR316 billion ($85 billion), about 12 percent of the Gulf kingdom’s GDP, compared to a deficit of SR402 billion in 2016, which […]
Dubai, UAE, 9 March 2017: Dubai Islamic Bank (DIB), the largest Islamic bank in the UAE, has been awarded with “Best Sukuk House” at the EMEA Finance Middle East Banking Awards 2016. The ninth edition of the EMEA Finance Middle East Banking Awards took place at the Conrad Hotel in Dubai recently, and celebrated the regional banking industry’s top achievers. Dubai Islamic Bank is an international leader […]
The way that markets are reported affects the way they are perceived, and the way that investors behave. So can the way journalists report the markets be measured? Are we doing a good job? Historically, it appears that we are not. This week, Diego Garcia of the University of Colorado at Boulder presented a paper to a conference on journalism and markets at Columbia Business School. Entitled […]
By Gabriel Stargardter | MEXICO CITY MEXICO CITY Last month’s 40 percent decline in migrant detentions along the southern U.S. border represents a victory for U.S. President Donald Trump, but may prove short-lived unless he follows through with his hard-line vows, past experience shows. Graphic on Central American migration to the United States: here Trump’s administration on Wednesday trumpeted the February decline as evidence its executive orders […]
The SEC just issued their ruling on the Winkelevoss bitcoin ETF, and it wasn’t good news for enthusiasts of the digital currency. Regulators rejected the proposed application, mainly because of the lack of regulation currently surrounding bitcoin. An approval would have meant that the public could invest in bitcoin simply by purchasing shares in the ETF, which would trade on a U.S-based stock exchange. The assumption was that an […]
The internet as it currently stands is “not fit for purpose” to engage the connectivity of things and machines, according to Cisco ANZ CTO Kevin Bloch, as mobility requirements will be subverted by the Internet of Things (IoT) and a complete re-engineering will need to take place. “As we move to more machines being connected than humans, the first generation of the internet is not fit for […]
By Alastair Sharp | TORONTO TORONTO Three families who helped shelter former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in Hong Kong in 2013 after his mass leak of information about surveillance programs have asked Canada for asylum, their lawyer said on Friday. The families – three Sri Lankan adults, a Filipina, and three stateless children – have had long-pending asylum claims in Hong Kong that they […]
By Shadia Nasralla | VIENNA VIENNA Four planned Turkish political meetings in Austria were cancelled on Friday in the latest signs of unease across Europe over a series of campaign events to rally support among expatriate Turks for President Tayyip Erdogan. A spokesman for police in the city of Linz said the private owner of a venue there had cancelled an event featuring a party colleague of […]
By Caroline Valetkevitch | NEW YORK NEW YORK U.S. stocks rose on Friday after a solid jobs report pointed to strength in the domestic economy and supported expectations the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates next week. Indexes ended lower for the week, however, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq breaking a six-week streak of gains. Government data showed 235,000 jobs were added in the public and […]
There is no doubt that there is still debate on the medical merits of cannabis, but the varying information still does not stop many people from using cannabis to aid their conditions. A recent survey in Australia shows that people with epilepsy are included in this population. Cannabis For Epilepsy In a first nationwide survey on cannabis use among epilepsy patients in Australia, researchers found that 14 […]
DUBAI // Positivity and well-being was at the top of the agenda for more than 2,000 people who took part in a happiness festival on Friday. Visitors of all ages took part in the city’s first Happiness Festival organised by the Happiness Hub, a positive psychology consultancy, held at the Dubai Polo and Equestrian Club. “The Happiness Festival is all about making happiness simple and accessible,” said […]
By Toni Clarke | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON U.S. President Donald Trump has chosen Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a conservative health policy expert with deep ties to the pharmaceutical industry, to lead the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a White House official said on Friday. If confirmed by the Senate, Gottlieb would be in charge of implementing Trump’s plan to dramatically cut regulations governing food, drugs, cosmetics, dietary supplements and […]
A Chinese property developer constructing a huge housing project in southern Malaysia has become the latest corporate victim of Beijing’s crackdown on capital flight. Country Garden has closed showrooms in mainland China for its flagship $100bn Forest City development in response to measures by Chinese regulators that have made it harder for individuals to move money out of the country. A slowing Chinese economy, rising US interest rates […]
In this May 13, 2015, file photo, Google’s new self-driving prototype car is introduced at the Google campus in Mountain View, Calif. Cars with no steering wheel, no pedals and nobody at all inside could be driving themselves on California roads by the end of 2017, under proposed new rules that would give a powerful boost to the technology from the nation’s most populous state. (AP Photo/Tony […]
By Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON The U.S. military said on Friday it plans to forge ahead with building the THAAD missile defence system in South Korea, separating the issue from a political crisis in Seoul that saw President Park Geun-hye’s removal from office on Friday. The United States started deploying the first elements of its advanced anti-missile defence system in South Korea on […]
ISLAMABAD – The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) led Federal and Punjab governments organised the International Women’s Day to distract attention from the Panama Papers investigation and the ongoing case in the Supreme Court, alleges senior columnist and analyst Haroon-ur-Rasheed. Rasheed, who has given conclusive evidence of Valentine’s Day being a PML-N ploy to distract the masses away from the massive corruption scandals, maintains that the ruling party […]
10 March 2017 MARC has affirmed its ratings of MARC-1/AA on Murud Capital Sdn Bhd’s (Murud Capital) Senior Commercial Papers/Medium-Term Notes Programme (Senior CP/MTN Programme) of up to RM290 million. The outlook on the ratings is stable. Murud Capital currently has an outstanding RM279 million Senior CP under the Senior CP/MTN Programme. Murud Capital is a special purpose vehicle incorporated by MRCB-Quill REIT to set up the […]
WASHINGTON A series of tweets by White House spokesman Sean Spicer on Friday commenting on strong February job creation figures may have run afoul of federal guidance barring most officials from commenting on key economic data within an hour of its release. The rule, Statistical Policy Directive Number 3, is meant to “preserve the distinction between the policy-neutral release of data by statistical agencies and their interpretation […]
By Jon Herskovitz | AUSTIN, Texas AUSTIN, Texas A man detained after federal prosecutors said he was involved in a fire in January that destroyed a Texas mosque has been ordered held on a charge unrelated to the arson, court records showed. A federal judge ordered Marq Perez, 25, to be detained after he appeared in U.S. district court on Thursday in Corpus Christi but Perez’s lawyer […]
