Bloomberg Builders started work on more US homes than forecast in January after an upward revision to starts in the prior month, a sign construction was on a steady path entering 2017. Residential starts totaled an annualized 1.25 million, easing from a 1.28 million pace in the prior month, a Commerce Department report showed. The median forecast of economists ...

  Bloomberg Ignore those million-plus empty new homes scattered across Spain, a developer owned by Lone Star Funds says there’s never been a better time to build more. Neinor Homes, bought in 2014 by the Dallas-based investor, aims to become one of Spain’s biggest homebuilders by increasing construction in big cities where the housing stock is running low, according to ...

  Bloomberg OPEC could extend its oil supply-reduction pact with non-members or even apply deeper cuts from July if global crude inventories fail to drop to a targeted level, OPEC sources said. The group, together with Russia and other non-OPEC oil producers, agreed late last year to cut output by 1.8 million barrels per day (bpd) to reduce a price-sapping ...

  Bloomberg Kuwait is sticking with plans to add half a million barrels a day of oil-production capacity as it prepares for the eventual expiration of the output quotas OPEC adopted to help drain a global oversupply, the head of Kuwait Oil Co. said. State-run KOC plans to raise the Gulf nation’s capacity from its current level of 3.15 million ...

  Bloomberg Israel’s annual consumer price index rose in January for the first time since 2014, finally turning positive after two years of record low interest rates. The index rose 0.1 percent in January from a year earlier, having declined on an annual basis for 28 months, Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics said in a statement on Wednesday. Economists in ...

  Bloomberg The government of Oman is considering financing structures that let it get advance payments from oil traders, reducing the government’s need to borrow more money from banks, sources familiar with the matter said. Under the proposed structures, Oman’s national oil company might get paid as much as two years before oil was delivered, in exchange for price discounts ...

  Bloomberg Cost-cutting pressure sparked by onshore wind power auctions in Germany and France may spur participants to scale up the size of projects and scale of finance in key European markets, according to state lender Norddeutsche Landesbank Girozentrale. Germany is tendering 2.8 gigawatts of onshore wind this year in auctions starting in May. France follows in November with plans ...

  Bloomberg India approved awarding rights for 31 small discovered oil and gas fields in its first auction in six years, entrusting most of these to new entrants as it seeks to boost local production. Sun Petrochemicals Pvt., a privately owned company formed by the directors of drugmaker Sun Pharmaceuticals Industries Ltd., and engineering company Megha Engineering & Infrastructure Ltd. ...

  Bloomberg China’s stepping up its campaign for greater clout in global commodities trading. The Asian nation’s state-run Sinochem Group is said to be in early talks to become a strategic investor in embattled commodities trader Noble Group Ltd. A potential deal could give the Chinese oil and chemicals behemoth access to Noble’s trading expertise and businesses around the world, ...

  Bloomberg Sleep deprivation is doing more harm in Japan than just making people grumpy and unhealthy. It is also holding back the world’s third-largest economy. The problem has been getting worse in recent years. Nearly half of full-time workers say they don’t get enough sleep, citing long overtime hours as a primary reason, according to a government white paper ...