ABU DHABI // Nepalese expatriates are worried that friends and family at home are being caught up in the currency crisis engulfing India. India and Nepal share a border and travel between them is free and easy, meaning many Nepalis who earn or accept Indian rupees are struggling to exchange their 500 and 1,000 notes since the bills were withdrawn on November 8. “We don’t have big […]
By Tetsushi Kajimoto and Cynthia Kim | TOKYO/SEOUL TOKYO/SEOUL Asian currency policymakers are worried that the strengthening of the dollar on expectations of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s fiscal policies could be used by his administration as a stick to beat them with on trade protectionist grounds. China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are already on the U.S. Treasury’s monitoring list, along with Germany and Switzerland, having met […]
By Samuel Shen and John Ruwitch | SHANGHAI SHANGHAI Scores of Hong Kong-listed companies – many small – are on a roadshow blitz in China to whet the appetite of mainland investors ahead of the launch of a cross-border investment link between Shenzhen and Hong Kong. Mainland investors are enthusiastic, viewing the cross-border channel as a way to buy relatively cheap growth companies and hedge against a […]
By David Shepardson | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON Ford Motor Co (F.N), one of Donald Trump’s prime corporate targets on the campaign trail, offered the President-elect a chance to claim a victory late on Thursday by informing him it would not shift production of a Lincoln sport utility vehicle to Mexico from Kentucky. Trump jumped at the chance, claiming in a tweet that he had “worked hard” with Ford […]
By Dan Burns and Jennifer Ablan | NEW YORK NEW YORK With President-elect Donald Trump promising to spend as much as half a trillion dollars on infrastructure and slash taxes – initiatives that could add dramatically to the U.S. debt and balloon the budget deficit – Wall Street is far more focused on who will next head the U.S. Treasury than it was in the previous selection […]
China has weakened the renminbi’s trading band for a record 11th straight day, taking its currency to an eight-year low as expectations of US interest rate rises buoyed the dollar against the region’s currencies. This puts the renminbi within a hair’s breadth of suffering a 10 per cent decline versus the dollar since the People’s Bank of China caught markets by surprise with its one-off devaluation in […]
By Patrick Rucker | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON A leading U.S. bank regulator on Friday reversed course and positions the agency to claw back pay of former executives at Wells Fargo & Co after a phony-accounts scandal. The lender must also now seek prior approval before naming new bank leadership, said the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the main regulator for federal banks. Friday’s move puts executive […]
Friday 17:00 GMT. Wall Street slipped as the dollar climbed to a new 13-year high and US government bond yields hit multi-month peaks on Friday on expectations that president-elect Donald Trump’s policies will boost the economy and deliver tighter monetary policy. After a mixed Asia-Pacific session, which included Japanese equities entering a bull market, the pan-European Stoxx 600 slide 0.3 per cent. Investors have been eyeing the […]
By EconMatters We delve into the recent 10-Day move in the US Dollar Index, and look at the major currency pairs in this video. The Oil and commodity related currencies may outperform against the US Dollar next week on optimism regarding an OPEC deal getting done. Expect a largely range bound market in an overall light holiday trading week. © EconMatters All Rights Reserved | Facebook | […]
Photo The view from Elias Muhanna’s grandparents’ balcony, in Roumieh, Lebanon, in 2010. Credit The Muhanna Family When I was a child, I spent most summers at my grandparents’ home in the Lebanese mountain village of Roumieh, overlooking Beirut and the Mediterranean coast. From the swing on the veranda, an expanse of umbrella pines and terracotta-roofed villages tumbled steeply toward the sea. In the evenings, my grandfather […]
Friday 06:00 GMT. The US dollar continues to push higher and sovereign bonds remain under pressure, while major equities benchmarks are on track to finish the week on a positive note. European bourses are expected to open firmer, with spreadbetters predicting the UK’s FTSE 100 will add 5 points to 6,800 and Germany’s Dax to gain 30 points to 10,716. US index futures suggest the S&P 500 […]
Rising market expectations for growth and inflation were not the only things behind the selling pressure on US Treasuries after the US election. One gauge of long-term Treasury market risk known as the term premium has also climbed. The day after the election of Donald Trump as the next US president, the 10-year term premium made its biggest single-day jump since 2011. The move was within the […]
Amid all the attempts to guess what Donald Trump’s election means for Europe’s trade, security and populist politicians, one conclusion stands out: his administration may be good news for the European Central Bank. The reason is not any particular act by the president-elect; rather, it is the reaction of markets, which could help the European economy and give the central bank more room to act. Foreign exchange […]
LONDON Battered bonds and emerging market currencies enjoyed some respite on Thursday as the dollar took a breather from a post-U.S. election charge that has taken it to a 13-1/2 year high. Wall Street looked set for a quiet start and Europe’s main stock markets <0#.INDEXE> were shuffling sideways as the dip in global bond yields cooled bank stocks, which have been rising on better lending profits. […]
“When the economic crisis hits the elite, it means the suffering is all over the place,” said Malak Rostom, the vice president of the student union. “If we can’t afford it, we can tell how much other people are suffering.” Continue reading the main story Some Egyptians may sneer at the problems of the children of middle- and upper-class families, worried about tuition increases that dwarf the […]
UK retail sales grew rapidly in October as consumers — yet to experience the impact of the weaker currency — continued to spend and colder weather boosted clothing sales. The seasonally adjusted volume of sales was 1.9 per cent higher in October than in September, the Office for National Statistics said on Thursday. Sales were boosted by strong growth in clothing and footwear as the end of […]
Thursday 08:30 GMT. European and US equity gauges are subdued as government bond yields dip from multi-month highs and the dollar stalls after hitting its strongest level since 2003. Following a muted Asia-Pacific session — encapsulated by Japan’s Nikkei 225 closing unchanged — index futures suggest the S&P 500 will dip 1 point to 2,176 when the opening bell rings later in New York, leaving the Wall […]
Since last week’s US elections, emerging market assets have been spooked by the possibility of higher US interest rates and greater trade protectionism. That this should result in sudden and broad-based losses for holders of all types of EM investments — including equities, local debt, external bonds and currencies — should not come as a great surprise. What is unusual, however, is for such large losses to […]
CAIRO — An Egyptian criminal court sentenced a police officer to life in prison on Wednesday for fatally shooting a man who refused to give him a free cup of tea. It was an unusual move by a court in a country where the police are generally allowed to act with impunity, human rights activists said. The shooting in April, in which the tea vendor was killed […]
Wednesday 17:00 GMT. US and European stocks were softer as the dollar hit a 13-year high and bond yields eased off multi-month peaks, as investors reined in bets that US president-elect Donald Trump’s pledge of infrastructure spending and tax cuts would accelerate inflation. In Europe, Germany’s Dax fell 0.7 per cent as shares in Bayer fell 4.2 per cent after the drugmaker raised €4bn to pay for […]
A popular measure of the dollar climbed to its highest level in more than 13 years, propelled by the expectation of rising US interest rates, the expectation of significant fiscal stimulus and concerns about the rise of populist forces in Europe. The DXY, an index that measures the dollar against a basket of its main peers and primarily weighted to the euro, gathered pace on Wednesday, rising […]
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Suez Crisis that shocked the western world with its tangles of politics and nationalism, greed and opportunism, imperial manoeuvring and Cold War brinkmanship. Michael Doran, former White House Middle East adviser and a deputy assistant secretary in the department of defence under President George W Bush, in his new book Ike’s Gamble: America’s Rise to Dominance in the Middle […]
Commercial banks in the Gulf could lose their ability to have dollar trades cleared through the US banking system, increasing risks for them, the UAE’s central bank governor has warned. Mubarak Rashid al-Mansouri told a financial conference that US and European banks were continuing to scale back their relationships with Gulf banks because foreign regulators were requiring them to do more due diligence on customers, raising costs […]
|By Matein Khalid| Donald Trump’s shock win will have a profound impact on the GCC economic constellation via multiple feedback loops. His economic policies mean a much higher US dollar, anathema to GCC economies since it correlates with stock/property market crashes, banking stress and oil slumps. This is the macroeconomic linkage due to the GCC US dollar peg whose lessons the region learnt the hard way in […]
