By Swati Pandey and Charlotte Greenfield | WELLINGTON WELLINGTON New Zealand Finance Minister Bill English said on Tuesday he planned to stand for prime minister after John Key’s surprise resignation a day earlier. English, a former Treasury Department analyst who is also deputy leader of the ruling centre-right National Party, is viewed by both lawmakers and political analysts as the front-runner for the top job. “I can […]
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said on Monday he would name retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson as secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The following is a list of Republican Trump’s selections for top jobs in his administration. All the posts but that of national security adviser require Senate confirmation: DEFENCE SECRETARY: JAMES MATTIS Mattis is a retired Marine Corps general known for his tough talk, […]
The great American corporate buyback party was expected to fizzle out next year, leaving a hangover of debt and remorse. Instead, the boom may soon find renewed succour if US companies bring their pile of foreign-based cash back home. A tax holiday for US companies looms under president-elect Donald Trump, with some seeing this wave of cash as the catalyst of an investment boom and faster US […]
20 years, to the day, after Greenspan’s iconic speech that warned of the unintended consequences of “irrational exuberance,” we find ourselves, yet again, in the midst of perhaps the largest asset bubble in history. In fact, Greenspan’s warning, previously made in a speech on Dec. 5, 1996, eerily reflects many of the same concerns surrounding the market today with low interest rates and lower risk premiums driving […]
December 5, 2016 by: Anjli Raval, Oil and Gas Correspondent Oil rose to its highest level since mid-2015, topping $55 a barrel, as traders bet on supplies tightening after Opec struck a deal last week to cut production for the first time in eight years. The 13-member cartel has now invited producers from outside the cartel to Vienna this week, as it looks to secure their backing […]
Good morning. Here’s our daily summary of all the media news you need to know. Want to get this briefing in your inbox every morning? Subscribe here. Fake news is not the sole province of slimeball digital practitioners in faraway lands enabled by the righteous souls at Facebook and Google. There’s also — as has ever been so — the government. “Police investigating a notorious gang in […]
By Jonathan Spicer | NEW YORK NEW YORK The U.S. election of Donald Trump has created “considerable” uncertainty over the policies he will pursue so it is too soon for the Federal Reserve to judge whether its plan for gradual interest rate hikes needs adjusting, one of the most influential Fed policymakers said on Monday. In a speech that stepped well into fiscal policy, including a nod […]
By Michael Holden | LONDON LONDON The British government’s appeal against a legal ruling that it needs parliamentary approval to trigger the formal process of leaving the European Union is being heard in the country’s top court this week. Prime Minister Theresa May has announced that she will invoke “Article 50” of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty by the end of March and begin the formal Brexit negotiations […]
Shinzo Abe will make a historic visit to Pearl Harbor later this month where he will remember the dead of World War Two alongside outgoing US president Barack Obama. The visit will make Mr Abe the first sitting Japanese prime minister to visit Pearl Harbor since his country’s surprise attack on the Hawaiian port began the Pacific war 75 years ago. Following Mr Obama’s visit to the […]
MOSCOW: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday he was confident Moscow and Washington can reach a deal in talks this week on the withdrawal of all rebels from the eastern part of the Syrian city of Aleppo.He told a news conference once the deal was reached, rebels who stay in the besieged eastern part of the city will be treated as terrorists and Russia will […]
By Kiyoshi Takenaka | TOKYO TOKYO Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will visit Pearl Harbor this month with U.S. President Barack Obama, becoming his country’s first leader to travel to the site of the Japanese attack 75 years ago that drew the United States into World War Two. “This will be a visit to console the souls of the victims,” Abe told reporters on Monday. “I would […]
In the United States, too, I found resistance to the idea that Brexit was a harbinger of a Trump victory. I was assured over and over by liberal friends that Trump would never be president. American voters were too sensible to fall for his hateful demagogy. Trump, I was told, was a product of peculiarly American strains of populism that flare up periodically, like the anti-immigrant nativism […]
A new battle is breaking out among the titans of cloud computing, as competition in the fast-growing sector shifts to a fresh arena: artificial intelligence. Amazon is the latest tech company to join the fray, boosting its focus on artificial intelligence at a time when Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing division, is locked in competition with Microsoft and Google. AWS, which sells computing and data storage […]
By Jack Kim and Ju-min Park | SEOUL SEOUL Besides South Korean President Park Geun-hye, the biggest casualty of the country’s mushrooming political corruption scandal may be the presidential aspirations of United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Although he has not declared his candidacy, Ban was until a month ago the front-runner in opinion polls to win the election scheduled for Dec. 20, 2017, a race he was […]
Photo Secretary of State John Kerry with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in New York in September. At the Saban Forum in Washington on Sunday, Mr. Kerry called the building of Israeli settlements an obstacle to peace with the Palestinians. Credit Darren Ornitz/Reuters Secretary of State John Kerry on Sunday accused right-wing Israelis of deliberately thwarting efforts to broker a peace deal with the Palestinians. In […]
PARIS Socialist French Prime Minister Manuel Valls is to announce later on Monday that he will run for president in next year’s election, Agence France-Presse and French television reported. Valls’ office issued a statement that he would make a declaration at 1730 GMT at the town hall in Evry, just south of Paris, but it gave no further details. His expected announcement follows a primary ballot in […]
Discuss the law of large numbers with statisticians and they mean using large samples to improve experiments. Analysts take the phrase to mean no company or economy can grow stratospherically forever. China watchers have another approach, forecasting eye-popping numbers for future foreign investment into Chinese financial markets. Expected long-term inflows via the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect, launched on Monday, are no exception. But in the short term, […]
Following a successful listing on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) on November 17 with a market capitalisation of AU$23 million, conversational commerce company Flamingo is now looking at Australia as a key market, with online lending marketplace DirectMoney being announced as its first local client. Born in Australia and based in the US, Flamingo is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that provides an “intelligent guided selling platform” to […]
John Key has resigned as New Zealand’s prime minister, saying it felt like “the right time to go” and that he wanted to leave on his own terms ahead of next year’s general election. Mr Key, a former Merrill Lynch banker who won three consecutive elections and whose National party is ahead in opinion polls, said he would vote for Bill English, deputy prime minister, in a […]
By Crispian Balmer and Gavin Jones | ROME ROME Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said he would resign after suffering a crushing defeat on Sunday in a referendum on constitutional reform, tipping the euro zone’s third-largest economy into political turmoil. His decision to quit after just two and a half years in office deals a blow to the European Union, already reeling from multiple crises and struggling […]
The cashless society is catching up to all of us. As SHTFPlan.com’s Mac Slavo notes, Most of Europe has shifted that way, and now India is forcing the issue. In the United States, people are being acclimated to it, and may soon find that no other option is practical in the highly-digitized online world. Once that takes hold, the banksters, bureaucrats and hackers will have total […]
By Nichola Saminather and Wayne Cole | SINGAPORE/SYDNEY SINGAPORE/SYDNEY The euro was under the gun on Monday, skidding to a 20-month low after Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said he would resign following a stinging defeat on constitutional reform that could destabilise the country’s shaky banking system. The single currency, which slumped to as low as $1.0505 EUR= in early Asian trade after opening at around $1.0685, […]
Beirut, Lebanon, December 4, 2016 : (ME NewsWire) During a special honoring ceremony held at the Four Seasons Hotel in Dubai, the publishers of Global Reinsurance and StrategicRISK announced the winners of the 2016 MEA Risk & Insurance Excellence Awards, honoring Mr. Farid Chedid, Chairman and CEO of Chedid Re, a Chedid Capital Holding company, as the ‘MEA Industry Achiever of the Year’. The prestigious title awarded […]
Patriots Cruise Past Rams Photo Patriots receiver Chris Hogan celebrated a first-half touchdown against the Rams. Credit Maddie Meyer/Getty Images The New England Patriots may have lost some explosiveness on offense with the season-ending injury to Rob Gronkowski, but with the way the team’s defense swallowed Jared Goff whole, a missing piece on New England’s offense hardly seemed to matter as the Patriots beat the Los Angeles […]
