Fears that high-speed traders have been rigging the U.S. stock market went mainstream last week thanks to allegations in a book by financial author Michael Lewis, but there may be a more serious threat to investors: the increasing amount of trading that happens outside of exchanges. Some former regulators and academics say so much trading is now happening away from exchanges that publicly quoted prices for stocks […]
|By TAP Staff| A new Citibank report on Dubai property market asserts there is little room of investors to show complacency as the measures to curb speculative demand and to strengthen the prudential regulation of the real estate and banking sectors so far do not remove the threat of a repeat of property-led volatility of 2008-09. As Dubai’s property market booms and large-scale projects are announced, parallels […]
India’s high-profile RBI governor is likely to come under political pressure to retreat from his hawkish stance on inflation if opposition leader Narendra Modi wins power in the general election. Strategists in Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), confident that his jobs-first policy pitch will secure a strong voter mandate, suggest that they would prefer to have one of their own at the helm of the Reserve Bank […]
A year after Citigroup Inc. declared the decade-long run of commodity gains over, wacky weather, dead piglets and Vladimir Putin have gotten in the way. While Citigroup rang “death bells” in April 2013 for the synchronized super cycle fueled by economic growth in China, extreme weather and supply squeezes led to surprise rallies in 2014’s first three months. Coffee hit a two-year high, cattle and hogs rose […]
Wall Street leaders including Lloyd Blankfein and James Gorman, who have courted business in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, are facing a dilemma as tensions over Ukraine escalate. Their scheduled attendance at Putin’s annual investor showcase in St. Petersburg in May is in doubt as sanctions imposed by the U.S. in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea — and retaliatory moves by Putin — threaten the ties between Russia’s […]
Fierce solar blasts that could have badly damaged electrical grids and disabled satellites in space narrowly missed Earth in 2012, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday. The bursts would have wreaked havoc on the Earth’s magnetic field, matching the severity of the 1859 Carrington event, the largest solar magnetic storm ever reported on the planet. That blast knocked out the telegraph system across the United States, according to […]
|Blaise Robinson| Reuters| Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Ex Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange February 3, 2014. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid A Reuters’ poll of economists shows non-farm payrolls are expected to have grown by 185,000 last month, snapping back from December’s three-year low. “Following the surprisingly weak figure for December, investors’ expectations are quite low this time, so […]
JPMorgan Chase & Co. and HSBC Holdings are among banks planning to compete for a role in the largest Saudi Arabian share sale in at least 12 years, according to five people with knowledge of the matter. The banks will vie with local lenders including Banque Saudi Fransi (BSFR) and Gulf International Bank to be appointed as financial adviser on the sale of a 15 percent stake […]
Russia’s economy is showing signs of a crisis, the government in Moscow said as the U.S. and the European Union announced sanctions over the country’s support for the Crimea region breaking away from Ukraine. “The situation in the economy bears clear signs of a crisis,” Deputy Economy Minister Sergei Belyakov said in Moscow yesterday. The cabinet needs to refrain from raising the fiscal burden on companies, which […]
As U.S. and European officials threaten sanctions in their face-off with Russia over Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s $160 billion in oil and natural gas exports may be his most potent weapon to limit punitive measures. The U.S. and its European allies, set to meet today in Brussels, have few levers to deter Putin even as they warn Russia not to annex Crimea after a referendum in Ukraine’s southern […]
Within 18 months of leaving his trading job to open a lunchtime eatery at the Dubai financial center in 2011, Nabil Al Rantisi was back: selling stocks and rebuilding one of the city’s largest brokerages. “I saw my window of opportunity,” Rantisi, managing director of Mena Corp Financial Services LLC, said in a March 9 telephone interview from Dubai. “Things started picking up in September 2012. By […]
Dubai refinanced $20 billion at a quarter of the original cost, freeing cash to service liabilities and fund expansion plans. The emirate rolled over $10 billion of bonds owed to the central bank and a loan of the same amount due to Abu Dhabi’s government, and will pay a fixed interest of 1 percent on both, according to a statement on state-run WAM news agency yesterday. The […]
Dubai property prices rose by almost 35 per cent last year, according to the latest Global House Price Index by a UK-based consultancy. Prices were just 25 per cent below their 2008 peak, it said. “Dubai recorded the largest annual rise in mainstream property prices with prices rising 15.3 per cent in the six-month period (Q2 to Q4 2013),” the report said. In February, JLL, a real […]
|By Aki Ito| Who needs an army of lawyers when you have a computer? When Minneapolis attorney William Greene faced the task of combing through 1.3 million electronic documents in a recent case, he turned to a so-called smart computer program. Three associates selected relevant documents from a smaller sample, “teaching” their reasoning to the computer. The software’s algorithms then sorted the remaining material by importance. “We […]
|By Rajhkumar K Shaaw and Santanu Chakraborty| For the first time in five years, Nilesh Dedhia is buying Indian stocks. The 48-year-old owner of a die-casting factory in Mumbai is among a growing number of local investors returning to the $1.2 trillion equity market on speculation national elections in May will deliver a government with the mandate to revive economic growth from a decade low. That optimism […]
The world’s most-profitable banks have never been so unloved by stock investors. China’s four-biggest lenders, which reported $126 billion of earnings in the 12 months through September, sank to the lowest valuations on record in Hong Kong trading yesterday. The MSCI China Financials Index dropped to an almost decade low versus the global industry benchmark while the market value of Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd., […]
Pakistan’s rupee surged 5.2 percent this week, the best performance among world currencies, as the nation’s rising foreign reserves and improving economy buoyed investor confidence. The country’s currency stockpile climbed to $9.52 billion this week, Finance Minister Ishaq Dar said yesterday, from $8.3 billion at the end of 2013. The economy is on course to achieve the official target of 4.4 percent expansion in the year ending […]
Singapore’s shrinking brokerage industry is set to get even smaller as trading restrictions planned by regulators dent profits, according to a body that represents individual brokers. The average daily value of shares traded in the city, which slumped 40 percent in the first two months of 2014 from a year earlier, will decline further should rules be implemented that include requiring collateral for some trades and shortening […]
Gold is getting more attractive to hedge-fund managers even as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. says the metal’s surprising rally this year will soon fizzle. Hedge funds and other speculators expanded bets on higher prices for a fourth week in New York futures and are now the most bullish since December 2012, government data show. While gold is off to its best start in six years after topping […]
|By TAP Staff| Being in Dubai helps businesses and investors to reap rich rewards, according to findings in a summary report compiled by Dubai FDI, the foreign investment agency in the Department of Economic Development (DED) of Dubai. And the ease and competitiveness of doing business in Dubai is attracting the attention of worldwide investors, it adds. The reports cover such key sectors as logistics, retail, information […]
Dry cargo shippers with smaller vessels are shifting to more-risk, more-reward spot markets, eyeing rising demand for sugar and grains — commodities well suited to versatile supramax and handysize ships. Ship owners generally prefer long-term charters in a weak market. The Baltic Dry Index o-year lows in recent weeks but confidence has been rocked by South Korean dry bulk group Korea Line Corp filing for bankruptcy protection, […]
|By Mayank Bhardwaj and Jo Winterbottom| A bad monsoon in India is the one that fails to deliver enough rain … most of the time. This year, a lack of rainclouds could be the silver lining that the government needs. India has no place left to store more grain, and can ill afford a hefty payout to farmers for the truckloads of produce that another monsoon could […]
U.S. regulators are mobilizing to shore up confidence in America’s generic-drug supply as alarm grows over the quality of products made in India, and the head of the largest U.S.-based maker of the medicines predicted more trouble lies ahead. “It’ll get worse before it gets better,” said Mylan (MYL) Inc. Chief Executive Officer Heather Bresch, whose company has half of its more than 20,000 employees in India. […]
Plans by Malaysia, the world’s largest palm oil producer after Indonesia, to increase consumption in biodiesel may support prices, said Douglas Uggah Embas, Plantation Industries and Commodities Minister. Proposals to implement the B7 program next year will result in annual use of 700,000 metric tons of palm methyl ester, said Embas. The B5 version, which involves blending 5 percent of palm methyl ester with 95 percent of […]
