By Sinead Carew and Lewis Krauskopf | NEW YORK NEW YORK U.S. bank stocks will stay in favor with investors as long as earnings reports in the coming week show an improving profit outlook while investors wait to see if U.S. President-elect Donald Trump lives up to his campaign promises. Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC.N), JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) and Bank of America (BAC.N) kicked off […]
Wells Fargo has laid down plans to close at least 400 branches over the next two years as part of a push to cut costs as the US bank tries to recover from the scandal over sham accounts. The San Francisco-based lender, which operates more than 6,000 branches across the country, is accelerating closures as it aims to reduce about $2bn in expenses by the end of […]
More than 15 million people now follow Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President, Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai on social media platforms, it has been announced. The number of followers on Twitter has reached 7.2 million, while he has 3.3 million followers on Facebook, 2.1 million on Instagram and 950,000 on Google Plus, news agency WAM reported. It said Sheikh Mohammed’s followers on LinkedIn […]
By Karen Freifeld | NEW YORK NEW YORK Moody’s Corp (MCO.N) has agreed to pay nearly $864 million to settle with U.S. federal and state authorities over its ratings of risky mortgage securities in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, the U.S. Department of Justice said on Friday. The credit rating agency reached the deal with the Justice Department, 21 states and the District of Columbia, […]
Qatar is regaining its appetite for deals. In the past two months alone, the world’s richest country per capita invested in Turkey’s biggest poultry producer, Russian oil giant Rosneft PJSC, and U.K. gas company National Grid Plc. The investments have been made through the Qatar Investment Authority, created in 2005 to handle the country’s windfall from liquefied natural gas sales, of which it is the world’s biggest exporter. […]
Rainfall records are being broken in the San Francisco Bay Area: six inches since the start of the year, the most since 1982. Local drivers react by randomly deploying wipers, brakes and lights; it is no surprise that autonomous cars are being developed here. Other Silicon Valley records look equally hazardous. The technology-dominated Nasdaq Composite index has set further highs this week and stands more than 10 […]
An increase in Facebook pushed the Nasdaq to a record high on Friday, and the S&P 500 also rose after major U.S. banks kicked off the fourth-quarter earnings season with strong results. Wall Street has surged since President-elect Trump’s unexpected election victory on optimism he will cut corporate taxes, spend on infrastructure and deregulate banks. With stocks trading at price-to-earnings valuations well above historical averages, many investors […]
Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon chief, didn’t get where he is by being nice to China. When Beijing tried to force his company to abandon a gas exploration project in the waters off Vietnam in 2008, ExxonMobil showed it the finger. BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and several others caved to Chinese pressure. ExxonMobil is still there, drilling on a Vietnamese license in waters also claimed by China. Is […]
A trading surge powered by Donald Trump’s victory has helped two of the three biggest US banks boost quarterly profits, fuelling hopes Wall Street can extend its post-election resurgence. JPMorgan Chase’s trading business, the largest in the world by revenues, produced its best ever fourth-quarter. Net income jumped 96 per cent from a year earlier to $3.43bn. At Bank of America’s global markets business, net income soared […]
By Trevor Hunnicutt | NEW YORK NEW YORK BlackRock Inc (BLK.N), the world’s biggest asset manager, reported better-than-expected quarterly profits on Friday as it clamped down on expenses and investors stormed into lower-cost funds to take advantage of a year-end rally. Investors poured $88 billion into the company’s market-tracking index investments and its iShares exchange-traded funds during the quarter, while pulling $546 million from funds managed actively […]
Nintendo’s brand-new console Switch will go on sale March 3, more than a decade after the debut of the blockbuster Wii gaming device, at a price of $300 with a new feature: an online gaming network. While the connectivity is new for Nintendo, the Xbox One or PlayStation 4 console have had the feature for years. Still, the higher-than-anticipated price cast a cloud over the announcement: Wal-Mart […]
Throughout the presidential campaign and since Donald Trump’s election, former diplomats, retired generals, and foreign-policy analysts have attempted to decipher, explain, and predict his foreign-policy strategy. Will he pursue the big-stick model of Teddy Roosevelt? Embrace a neo-Nixonian “madman” strategy? Is Trump actually a champion of foreign-policy realism, or perhaps no realist at all? But all those questions make the same mistake — they assume the incoming […]
BlackRock says it will raise its quarterly dividend after reporting the largest net inflows of new client money in its history in 2016, despite a 5 per cent fall in net income for the year. Reporting its fourth quarter and full-year results, the world’s largest asset manager said that it took in total net inflow of $202bn in 2016, as its total assets under management rose by […]
By Jamie McGeever | LONDON LONDON European and U.S. stocks looked to end a sluggish week on a high note on Friday, while the dollar was on track for its biggest weekly fall in two months and U.S. bond yields eyed their longest run of weekly declines since July. Investors largely shrugged off figures that showed Chinese exports fell the most last year since 2009, and will […]
Takata, the Japanese automotive supplier at the centre of a global recall crisis over its exploding airbags, is expected to plead guilty as early as Friday to criminal wrongdoing in the US, as the Obama administration targets the global auto industry with a final burst of fines over environmental and safety issues. Takata is expected to agree to a criminal settlement with the Department of Justice on […]
By Se Young Lee and Ju-min Park | SEOUL SEOUL Samsung Group leader Jay Y. Lee left the South Korean special prosecutor’s office early on Friday, more than 22 hours after arriving for questioning on bribery suspicions in an influence-peddling scandal that could topple President Park Geun-hye. Lee left the special prosecution office without answering reporters’ questions and headed to a waiting car. Prosecutors have been investigating […]
In this Thursday, Nov. 5, 2015, file photo, 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokees appear on display at a Fiat Chrysler dealership in Doral, Fla. On Thursday, Jan. 12, 2017, the U.S. government alleged that Fiat Chrysler Automobiles failed to disclose that software in some of its pickups and SUVs with diesel engines allows them to emit more pollution than allowed under the Clean Air Act. The Environmental Protection […]
Friday 04:50 GMT Overview Asian stocks were mixed in the wake of a retreat by US stocks and the dollar as investors continued to assess the fallout from Donald Trump’s combative press conference on Wednesday. What to watch Shares in Nintendo were down 2 per cent after the company announced details about its new Switch video game console, including price and technical specifications. The device, a hybrid […]
President-elect Donald Trump may be at war with the intelligence community, but on Thursday his pick to head the CIA tried to bridge the rift between the incoming president and his spies, saying he accepts the assessment that Russia meddled in the election to boost the Republican’s candidacy. “It’s pretty clear about what took place here, about Russian involvement in efforts to hack information and to have […]
Josh Benson and Tom McGeveran, who founded the politics, culture and media site Capital New York in 2010 before selling it to Politico in 2013, are leaving the company. The departures were announced in a memo to staff from Politico Editor-in-Chief John Harris, who also said Politico’s statewide operations would be consolidated in Rosslyn. Launched in 2015, Politico States has established a presence in states across America, […]
By David Shepardson and Bernie Woodall | NEW YORK/DETROIT NEW YORK/DETROIT The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday accused Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV of illegally using hidden software that allowed significant excess diesel emissions, the result of a probe that stemmed from regulators’ investigation of rival Volkswagen AG. The EPA action affects 104,000 U.S. trucks and SUVs sold since 2014, about one-sixth the number of vehicles than […]
Just days after Fiat-Chrysler’s (FCA) commitment to Trump, the Obama administration’s EPA has, as we previously noted, accused the carmaker of cheating on di4esel emissions tests (a la Volkswagen). FCA just responded, denying the charges. Fiat Chrsyler press release: FCA US is disappointed that the EPA has chosen to issue a notice of violation with respect to the emissions control technology employed in the company’s 2014-16 model […]
HONG KONG Property developer China Vanke (000002.SZ) (2202.HK), embroiled in a high-profile corporate power tussle for over a year, said on Thursday its No. 2 shareholder China Resources Group is considering a major plan. The country’s second-largest developer said in a statement it had been informed on Wednesday that China Resources and a unit were ‘formulating a major plan involving its holdings in Vanke but are still […]
By Emily Chow | SUNGKAI, Malaysia SUNGKAI, Malaysia The Malaysian plantation district of Sungkai has become an initial – and unlikely – battleground for an election that embattled Prime Minister Najib Razak is expected to call this year. Sungkai is home to ethnic Malays who work for the national palm plantation operator, Federal Land Development Authority (Felda). Known as “Felda settlers”, they have long been among the […]
