After an election filled with rhetoric about big and brash bankers running amok on Wall Street, Donald Trump has turned to the biggest and the brashest of them all: Jamie Dimon, chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase. The transition team of the president-elect called Mr Dimon on Wednesday night to sound him out about serving as Treasury secretary, according to a Reuters report that the FT […]
By Sumanta Dey | BENGALURU BENGALURU After Donald Trump’s unexpected victory in the U.S. presidential election, investors may refocus in the coming week on the health of the world economy and any signs that years of rock-bottom interest rates and fiscal austerity are coming to an end. Trump’s victory poses a major challenge to the conventional wisdom on the global economy, which for years has relied on […]
Donald Trump has appointed Mike Pence, his running mate, to head his transition team as he prepares to start naming people to fill top posts in his administration. Mr Trump also appointed four members of his family, including his daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner, along with the financiers Anthony Scaramucci and Steven Mnuchin. The team will also include Stephen Bannon, his campaign chief executive, Reince […]
The International Monetary Fund approved a $12 billion loan program for Egypt to restore investor confidence and help revive an economy battered by years of political turmoil. The Washington-based lender’s executive board approved the three-year loan on Friday. Approval of the IMF loan program, the largest of its kind on record in the Middle East, comes a week after Egypt floated its currency to end a crippling […]
By David Randall | NEW YORK NEW YORK Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the U.S. presidential race is pushing mutual fund managers out of dividend stocks and into the shares of financial, industrial and materials companies that stand to benefit from rising inflation. Although inflation remains subdued by most measures, U.S. longer-dated Treasury yields rose on Thursday to their highest levels in more than 10 months after […]
Saudi Arabian stocks extended their winning streak to six days, entering a bull market as investors bet the government’s belated payments to contractors would help spur more gains. The Tadawul All Share Index added 2.3 percent to the highest level since July, taking its rally this week to 7.7 percent. The gauge has advanced more than 20 percent since a recent low on Oct. 3, crossing the […]
ABU DHABI // Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed welcomed Prince Charles and Camilla in Al Ain to celebrate a year-long collaboration between the UAE and the UK in the arts. The UK-UAE Year of Cultural Collaboration was launched at Al Jahili Fort under the patronage of Sheikh Mohammed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and the Prince of Wales. The evening […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| Saudi Arabia’s $17.5 billion debut sovereign bond issue had a most successful start, with investor orders reaching $67 billion, according to reports. The huge response has meant that the oil kingdom is in a position to borrow more cheaply than was originally expected. According to Financial Times, the order book was also sufficiently large to enable the country to raise the amount it […]
|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 Arabian Post Staff| The three-month Saudi Interbank Offered Rate, or Saibor, used as a benchmark to price loans, has climbed 15 successive months to the highest in seven years, Bloomberg reported. It gained 84 basis points this year to 2.385 percent on Sunday, compared with a 27 basis-point advance in the London Interbank Offered Rate for dollars. Meanwhile, the loans-to-deposit ratio among Saudi banks, a key measure of […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| A high level panel will examine the effects and ramifications of de-risking for Middle East banks, under which correspondent banking relationships are constrained or blocked by international regulators protecting their banks from perceived risk such as money laundering or financing terrorism. The panel will discuss how banks manage de-risking, how it affects their small and medium sized corporate clients in the Middle East […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| The Dubai Islamic Economy Development Centre is in the process of developing a National Bonds Sukuk Trading Platform, which uses assets in the local economy to structure Shariah-compliant consumer financing. This is pat of the initiative to develop new strategies to meet the liquidity management and personal financing needs of Islamic banks and Islamic windows at conventional banks. These products are expected to […]
|By Matein Khalid| The Algiers pact was a game changer in the international oil markets. Crude oil prices have risen to three month highs above $50 Brent after OPEC agreed to cut output to the 32.5 – 33 MBD range, with the symbolic Saudi-Iranian deal reinforced by a sharp drop in US inventories and Hurricane Matthew’s havoc in the Caribbean. Unfortunately for OPEC, the US land rig […]
|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 […]
By Greg Roumeliotis and Liana B. Baker Salesforce.com Inc (CRM.N) is still deliberating whether it should make an offer for Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) in the face of resistance from Salesforce shareholders over the strategic merits and valuation of such a deal, people familiar with the matter said on Monday. Twitter shares have lost as much as a third of their value since Oct. 5 on concerns the […]
Standard Chartered Bank (China) (SCB China) has launched a direct trading business for RMB/AED and RMB/SR and the bank becomes the first batch of direct trading market-makers for RMB against AED and SR in China’s inter-bank FX market. Sami Mahfouz, head of Financial Markets UAE, said: “Standard Chartered has a broad network and historical presence in the Middle East and we offer one-stop products and solutions covering […]
UAE. The UAE industrial market has continued to show a relatively steady performance despite the emergence of economic headwinds, amidst on-going global uncertainty, according to the H1 2016 UAE Industrial & Logistics MarketView, by global real estate consultancy firm CBRE. The softening of crude oil prices over the past 18 months has had mixed effects on the UAE industrial sector, and on the markets in Dubai and […]
|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 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. […]
|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 Steve Austin| At first sight it appears that low oil prices are good for society. A low oil price helps us save dollars at the pump, acts as an economic catalyst making exchanges cheaper and thereby stimulating the economy. However, there are downsides as well, often out-of-sight-out-of-mind and we will address these today. Change in economic model For the first time we have entered an era […]
/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 […]
KUWAIT. On Aug 12, S&P Global Ratings affirmed its ‘AA/A-1+’ long- and short-term foreign and local currency sovereign credit ratings on Kuwait. The outlook is stable. The affirmation indicates that our ratings on Kuwait continue to be supported by the sovereign’s high levels of accumulated fiscal, external, and household wealth, despite the low oil price environment. The ratings are constrained by the concentrated nature of the economy […]
