|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 Adam Jourdan and Paul Carsten | SHANGHAI/BEIJING SHANGHAI/BEIJING Judging by the volume of online chatter, there’s a lot less buzz in China ahead of this week’s expected launch of the new Apple Inc iPhone, and people on the street say they’re more likely to “wait and see” what the latest device offers than rush out to buy. Posts on China’s popular Sina Weibo microblogging site show […]
/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 […]
By Eveline Danubrata and Glenys Kirana | JAKARTA JAKARTA Asian fans of smartphone game Pokemon Go are hunting out the best telecom providers and network gear to overcome the hurdle posed by patchy network signals in their race to capture virtual cartoon characters. From Indonesia to Hong Kong and Cambodia, the wild popularity of Nintendo’s (7974.T) augmented reality app is also driving lifestyle changes for many gamers, […]
By Harry Pearl and Charlotte Greenfield | SYDNEY SYDNEY German tech entrepreneur and alleged internet pirate Kim Dotcom will seek a review of a Federal Court decision which rejected his bid to keep hold of millions of dollars in assets held in Hong Kong and New Zealand, his lawyer said. A three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled two to one on Friday […]
A sign of Alibaba Group is seen at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) Asia 2016 in Shanghai, China, May 12, 2016. Reuters/Aly Song/File Photo HONG KONG Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd is offering to help international technology firms such as SAP SE to enter China, a market where foreign tech companies face increased government scrutiny. Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, said in […]
A worker climbs outside an Apple store in Hong Kong April 10, 2013. Reuters/Bobby Yip/File Photo HONG KONG Apple Inc found itself on the receiving end of a small, short-lived anti-U.S. protest this week in China, the tech firm’s biggest overseas market and a country where foreign firms have suffered damaging boycotts following international spats. A handful of unofficial Apple stores were picketed and social media users […]
Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk attends a forum on startups in Hong Kong, China January 26, 2016. Reuters/Bobby Yip/File Photo Tesla Motors Inc (TSLA.O) chief Elon Musk’s ambitious new “master plan” provided a vision of the company as a leader in sustainable energy, but lacked details on how the plan would be funded and executed. Musk sketched out a plan on Wednesday for an integrated carbon-free energy […]
Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk attends a forum on startups in Hong Kong, China January 26, 2016. Reuters/Bobby Yip/File Photo Tesla Motors Inc CEO Elon Musk on Sunday tweeted his intention to soon publish part two of his “top secret Tesla masterplan” following an embattled several weeks for the Silicon Valley heavyweight. The tweet, which read “Working on Top Secret Tesla Masterplan, Part 2. Hoping to publish […]
ABU DHABI // Abu Dhabi and Dubai remain among the most expensive cities in the Middle East and the world, a global cost-of-living survey has revealed. This year, Dubai ranked the 21st most expensive city in the world, up from 23 last year, while the capital came in number 25, up from 33 last year. Hong Kong is the world’s most expensive city for expats, while the […]
Beijing’s patent regulator has ordered Apple to stop selling its iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus in the city because their design too closely resembles that of a Chinese phone. Apple is appealing the ruling, which marks the latest challenge to the tech company in its second-largest market. The two iPhone models violated design patents held by Chinese device maker Shenzhen Baili because of similarities in external […]
After relishing a cocktail of cheap crude mixed with profits from fuel sales, Asia’s oil processors are facing their reckoning over a lack of restraint. Profits from turning crude into fuel in Asia since the beginning of April have averaged almost a third lower than levels over the previous six months, and are down 40 percent from the same period a year earlier. That’s already prompted some […]
Deal Professor By STEVEN DAVIDOFF SOLOMON It’s hard to get one’s head around it: An initial public offering that would value a company in the trillions of dollars. That’s trillions, with a T. Saudi Arabia is considering selling shares in its state oil company. With 261 billion barrels of oil in reserves and a yearly output of over three billion barrels of oil, the company, Saudi Aramco, […]
|By Matein Khalid|Dr. Mervyn King broke with tradition by publishing his book “The End of Alchemy: money, banking and the future of the global economy”. After all, retired governors of the Bank of England do not, as a rule, do not write/publish books, let alone write books that lambast the City of London’s culture of greed and hubris. It is no coincidence that Dr. King quotes T.S. […]
More than 18 months after Apple Pay took the United States by storm, the smartphone giant has made only a small dent in the global payments market, snagged by technical challenges, low consumer take-up and resistance from banks. The service is available in six countries and among a limited range of banks, though in recent weeks Apple has added four banks to its sole Singapore partner American Express; […]
A Bitcoin (virtual currency) paper wallet with QR codes and a coin are seen in an illustration picture taken at La Maison du Bitcoin in Paris, France, May 27, 2015. Reuters/Benoit Tessier/File Photo LONDON The price of the web-based digital currency bitcoin soared to its highest in almost two years on Tuesday, rising to more than $500 per unit, as worries about a further weakening of the […]
|By Matein Khalid| In retrospect, 2016 will go down in German political and economic history as a significant game changer, on the scale of 1989 (fall of the Berlin Wall), 1990 (reunification) and 1999 (the Euro), even 1945 (launch of Deutschemark), 1945 (Third Reich surrenders), 1943 (Stalingrad) and 1933 (Hitler elected). Chancellor Merkel, renamed Mutti Multi kulti, allowed a million migrants to settle in Germany. The far right […]
MANILA More than three months have passed since $81 million was stolen in a brazen cyber-heist from Bangladesh’s central bank and sent to Manila – yet authorities in the Philippines appear no closer to nabbing those who laundered most of the money through a bank and casinos here. Nobody has been arrested, the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) – the nation’s equivalent of the FBI – has […]
The SWIFT logo is pictured in this photo illustration taken April 26, 2016. Reuters/Carlo Allegri/Illustration/File Photo LONDON/CHICAGO Shortly after 7 p.m. on January 12, 2015, a message from a secure computer terminal at Banco del Austro (BDA) in Ecuador instructed San Francisco-based Wells Fargo to transfer money to bank accounts in Hong Kong. Wells Fargo complied. Over 10 days, Wells approved a total of at least 12 […]
|By Matein Khalid| If ever there was a year to win or lose money big time in emerging markets, 2016 was it. As an investor in the world’s dark alleys (the Third World rebranded as EM!), I am forced to dissect geopolitical, government/monetary policy, foreign exchange, flows, positioning and current account, volatility and credit cycle trends across emerging markets to develop money making strategies. It helps that I […]
With at least four months to go before the much-anticipated iPhone 7 is released, Apple fan sites are buzzing with the latest rumor that the new device might lack the innovative Smart Connector feature. Introduced last fall with the new iPad Pro, the Smart Connector enables the transfer of both power and data between two Apple devices without the need for cords or Bluetooth pairing. For example, […]
Apple Inc (AAPL.O) on Tuesday posted its first-ever decline in iPhone sales and its first revenue drop in 13 years as the company credited with inventing the smartphone struggles with an increasingly saturated market. The company’s sales dropped by more than a quarter in China, its most important market after the United States, and it also forecast another disappointing quarter for global revenues. Its shares fell about […]
Oil tumbled after output talks Sunday between the world’s biggest producers ended without an agreement, outweighing the supply impact of strikes that cut 60 percent of Kuwait’s output. Futures fell as much as 6.8 percent in New York. The summit in the Qatari capital faltered after Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations wouldn’t agree to a deal unless all OPEC members joined including Iran, which didn’t attend the […]
