News

  REUTERS Qatar Insurance reported second-quarter net profit that was unchanged from a year earlier, according to Reuters calculations. The insurer made a net profit of 280.1 million riyals ($76.9 million) in the three months ending June 30, Reuters calculated based on financial statements in lieu of a quarterly breakdown. That compares with a net profit of 280.9 million riyals ...

  Bloomberg Theresa May’s first meeting with Angela Merkel in Berlin will involve more pleasantries than hard bargaining. A week after taking office as UK PM, May, 59, will be keen to size up the woman who will be one of her main interlocutors as she navigates Britain’s exit from the EU. The German chancellor, in office for almost 11 ...

  Bloomberg The U.K. labor market showed continued strength before the country’s decision to leave the European Union. The unemployment rate fell to 4.9 percent in the three months through May, the lowest since the third quarter of 2005, the Office for National Statistics in London said on Wednesday. Economists in a Bloomberg survey had expected the rate to stay ...

  Bloomberg Embattled German auto giant Volkswagen said on Wednesday it booked a charge of 2.2 billion euros ($2.4 billion) in the first six months in relation to engine-rigging scandal, but its operating performance before that charge was better than expected. “The operating result for the Volkswagen group before special items is significantly higher than market expectations for the first ...

  Bloomberg Germany, one of Europe’s cheapest stock markets, is starting to see a resurgence in investor interest. Months of withdrawals from exchange-traded funds tracking German stocks are beginning to reverse amid a stabilizing euro and improving prospects for the country’s exporters. The biggest ETF following the shares just had three consecutive weeks of inflows for the first time since ...

  Bloomberg Morgan Stanley’s Matthew Hornbach called this year’s Treasury market rally. Now he’s revising his forecasts and is more bullish than just about anyone else. Ten-year U.S. yields will fall more than 50 basis points, or 0.5 percentage point, to 1 percent in the first quarter of 2017, according to Hornbach, the firm’s head of global interest-rate strategy in ...

  Bloomberg Oil held near $45 a barrel as U.S. industry data showed a drop in crude stockpiles, paring a surplus in the world’s largest fuel consumer. Futures were little changed in New York after dropping 1.3 percent Tuesday to a two-month low. Inventories declined by 2.3 million barrels last week, the American Petroleum Institute was said to report. While ...

  Bloomberg Anglo American Plc, the second-best performer on the FTSE 100 Index this year, cut its annual target for copper output after heavy snow at operations in Chile. The shares slumped the most in more than three weeks. Production will be 570,000 to 600,000 metric tons this year, down from a forecast of as much as 630,000 tons, as ...

  Bloomberg Sempra Energy says it’s more interested in making money from energy projects in Latin America than buying back shares. The San Diego, California-based utility owner said it’s scaling back its target for buying shares by $500 million and will instead use the cash to help build a $2 billion natural gas pipeline in Mexico. In fact, its Mexican ...

  Bloomberg When Ilan Goldfajn presides over his first policy meeting as Brazil’s central bank chief, he’ll have a daunting task: reviving an economy mired in its worst recession in a more than a century while restoring the bank’s inflation-fighting bona fides. Traders and analysts — who expect the central bank to keep interest rates unchanged at a 10-year high ...