British multinational hotels company InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) and Dubai’s Al-Futtaim have signed an agreement for management of the largest Holiday Inn hotel in the UAE. The 520-room Holiday Inn Dubai Festival City, a mixed-use waterfront community, is expected to be completed towards end-2017. The new hotel, the first branded mid-market hotel in the area, will connect directly to Dubai Festival City Mall. The hotel will also […]
While emojis will certainly not replace texts in messages anytime soon, it is increasingly integrated into modern electronic communication. That is why when Apple redesigned the peach emoji for an iOS 10 beta version, the company drew immense amount of flak, prompting a complete turnaround. Realistic iOS Style This issue has two important variables going for it. First, there is Apple’s drive to redesign the entire range of […]
Center for Public Integrity veteran John Dunbar has taken over as the organization’s new chief executive officer. Dunbar, 52, has worked at the Center for more than 12 years covering three separate stints. He first worked for the Center from 1999-2006, and during that time created the “Well Connected” project, an investigation of the political ties of the media and broadband industries. He came back briefly in […]
TOKYO A pause in both the sell-off in global bonds and sharp rise in the dollar following Donald Trump’s election victory, together with Wall Street’s record high overnight helped Asian shares steady on Wednesday from a four-month low struck a day earlier. President-elect Trump’s plans to cut taxes and boost infrastructure spending would boost demand while his proposals to deport illegal immigrants and impose tariffs on cheap […]
|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 […]
Rio Tinto’s lawyers uncovered more than a year ago internal emails about a questionable $10.5m payment to a consultant, but the mining company did not alert law enforcement authorities and investors about the matter until last week. The Anglo-Australian group said on November 9 it had notified authorities after discovering emails from 2011 that referred to the payment to the consultant, who helped head off a threat […]
By Lauren Hirsch and Liana B. Baker Snapchat has filed for an initial public offering, sources familiar with the situation said on Tuesday, which puts the messaging app a step closer to the biggest U.S. stock market debut since 2014. The Venice, California-based company could go public as soon as March and be valued at $20 billion to $25 billion, making it the largest IPO since Chinese […]
Sweden’s Riksbank is debating whether to become the first significant central bank to issue a digital currency as it responds to an increasing move away from cash in the Scandinavian country. The world’s oldest central bank — it was the first to issue paper banknotes in the 1660s — is launching a project to examine what a central bank-backed digital currency would look like and what challenges […]
“Phase one is the hope phase,” Stephen Cucchiaro, chief investment officer at 3 Edge Asset Management, says of the reaction in financial markets to president-elect Donald Trump. “As it is a while until he’s president, you can hope for fiscal stimulus getting growth going and reawakening animal spirits.” Evidence of exuberance is not hard to find. S&P 500 financials and heathcare stocks are flying; US 10-year Treasury […]
Dubai – 14 November 2016 GFH Capital, a subsidiary of Bahrain based GFH Financial Group, today announced an investment in AMA Group for its growing operations in the Kingdom of Bahrain and beyond. The investment will be in the form of a Shari’a compliant convertible Murabaha facility. The AMA Group manages the largest network of educational institutions across Asia. The AMA Group also has various other business […]
Members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party and other rightist politicians jumped to make hay of the change. Continue reading the main story Yoav Kish, a Likud member of Parliament, called for the expansion of Israeli sovereignty into the West Bank; Meir Turgeman, the chairman of Jerusalem’s municipal planning committee, said he would now bring long-frozen plans for thousands of Jewish homes in the fiercely contested […]
New London office construction activity has fallen 42 per cent from a year ago as Brexit and other uncertainties cast a shadow over the property market. Work began on 40 new office developments totalling 2.8m square feet over the past six months, down from a record 4.8m square feet recorded a year earlier, according to Deloitte Real Estate’s Crane Survey. Total development activity rose slightly from a […]
With US president-elect Donald Trump’s governing priorities slowly starting to take shape, the US steel industry emerged on Monday as one sector where investors are placing their bullish bets. Three companies — US Steel, AK Steel and iron-ore producer Cliffs Natural Resources — saw their stock ratings upgraded by Morgan Stanley analysts in the wake of last week’s election, pushing their share prices up. Mr Trump’s election […]
After months of sending government troops to battle militants blowing up oil pipelines in the Niger Delta, Muhammadu Buhari tried a different tack. The Nigerian president invited the region’s community leaders and traditional rulers to his villa this month for talks — a step energy sector executives hoped could halt a wave of sabotage since January that has cost the country billions of dollars in damages and […]
Brent crude oil dropped below $44 a barrel on Monday to hit its lowest level for three months, as a strengthening US dollar and doubts over Opec’s ability to agree supply curbs when it meets this month led to funds selling out of the market. Hedge funds and other large speculators have been paring their bets on higher oil prices for the past month, with the latest […]
US bank shares have staged the sharpest recovery rally since Wall Street emerged from the financial crisis in 2009, underlining the stark shift in investor sentiment that has gathered pace since Donald Trump captured the US presidency. The S&P 500 banks index, a gauge of the largest US banks, has turned a year-to-date fall that, at its worst, reached almost 25 per cent, to a gain of […]
By Elias Glenn and Kevin Yao | BEIJING BEIJING China’s economy largely showed further signs of steadying in October as expected, but disappointing retail sales growth and fears of U.S. trade frictions under incoming President Donald Trump are increasingly clouding the outlook. Fixed-asset investment quickened slightly and beat expectations in January-October as the government stepped up infrastructure spending to support growth, official data showed on Monday. But […]
The Nintendo Switch 2017 Presentation on Jan. 12, in which more details regarding the upcoming hybrid console will be revealed, is still several weeks away. While waiting for more information to be released by Nintendo regarding the Nintendo Switch, rumors and speculations are running rampant for the details that are still unknown for the device. Garnering perhaps the most amount of speculation among the unknown specifics of the […]
Warning: Full spoilers for the episode below. I’m a fan of Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s performance as Negan on The Walking Dead, but we’re quickly seeing that a little Negan goes a very long way. After listening to him flippantly speechify for a solid hour in the premiere, and then catching a bit more of him last week in “The Cell,” this week’s chapter began to collapse under […]
Copper recorded its best week in five years as speculators scrambled to reverse bearish bets following the election of Donald Trump as US president, which boosted hopes for more consumption in the western world. The promise of a big infrastructure programme in the US, following a decade of reliance on China, has driven the market to reassess the outlook for copper and other industrial metals such as […]
On Wall Street the S&P 500 has surged to within touching distance of a record high, with the US equity market electrified by Donald Trump’s capture of the White House and the Republican party unexpectedly keeping control of Congress in Tuesday’s US election result. As an historic week ends, investors believe that a macro economic regime change looms, upending the policy mix that has dominated in Washington […]
The Bank of Japan faces a defining stress-test of its “yield curve control” policy in coming days as the benchmark Japanese government bond yield nears zero and currency markets recalibrate themselves for a Donald Trump US presidency. With post-election yen volatility already making a mark on Japanese equities, traders in Tokyo said the focus would this week turn on JGB markets and the BoJ’s resolve. After wrestling […]
Currency dealers in search of the next great trade love a compelling trend, and after looking all year they seem to have found one in the last place expected — the US, where Donald Trump is president-elect. Before the election predictions were tentative, safe bets assumed only modest shifts in the foreign exchange status quo. Yet Mr Trump’s victory, and Republican success in capturing Congress, have prompted […]
Snap Inc. — Snapchat’s new name — and Nintendo launched the Spectacles and NES Classic Edition respectively, and they have proved to be some of the hottest tech products this month. The wearable and the retro gaming console are terribly difficult to come by, as they sold like hotcakes when they rolled out. That means there are a lot of disappointed fans out there, and “a lot” is probably […]
