Bloomberg A bad start to the year for Canadian natural gas producers is getting worse after wildfires in northern Alberta knocked out oil-sands operations that represent a key source of demand. Spot gas prices in Western Canada have been cut by more than half after oil-sands developers curtailed about 40 percent of their supply, reducing the amount of gas ...

  Bloomberg Vale SA, the world’s biggest iron-ore producer, will consider the sale of $10 billion of its best assets by the end of next year as it seeks to reduce its debt load amid sluggish demand. The Rio de Janeiro-based company also will try to raise $4 billion to $5 billion this year by selling such “non-core” businesses as ...

  Bloomberg Brazil’s real rose as the Senate gears up for a vote that would force President Dilma Rousseff out and into an impeachment trial she appears unlikely to survive, even as the central bank intervened to weaken the currency. The real strengthened 0.4% to 3.4639 per dollar in Sao Paulo as the monetary authority announced it would offer 20,000 ...

  The plight of the middle class is one of the hottest topics in the U.S. presidential campaign. Candidates compete to offer plans for the revival of the dependable middle, the foundation of society. The polarization isn’t only occurring in the U.S., though. In Germany, with its far more socialist income redistribution model, the middle class also is endangered. In ...

  Budgets can be austere things, as Australia’s was – or tried to be — in 2014. They can also be optimistic, about delivering surpluses or in this government’s case “jobs and growth.” Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his Treasurer Scott Morrison have delivered an optimistic budget. Or at least they delivered it optimistically, with Turnbull waxing lyrically if ...

  Catherine Putz SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS Ahead of the planned May 12 inauguration of the CASA-1000 project, the World Bank, one of the project’s main financiers, published a Q&A to try and provide answers to sustained criticisms of the project. The $1.17 billion CASA-1000 project aims to supply electricity from Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to Afghanistan and Pakistan via a ...

  BLOOMBERG U.S. stocks slipped after the biggest gain in two months, as global equities continued to churn just below multiyear highs amid corporate results and persistent signs that worldwide growth remains lackluster. Metals advanced as the dollar slipped. The S&P 500 Index retreated for the first time in four days, while European equities slid from a one-week high. Industrial ...

  ABU DHABI / EMIRATES BUSINESS The Emirates Securities Market Index has decreased by -0.46% to close at 4430.61 points. Accordingly the Market Capitalization has lost AED 3.3 billion attaining AED 720.89 billion. A total of 446.83 million Shares were traded with a total value of AED 0.58 billion during the trading session of 11-05-2016 through 6172 transactions. The number of companies ...

  Bloomberg ABN Amro Group NV reported a 13 percent decline in profit after its first full quarter as a listed company coincided with a market rout, crimping revenue from fees and commissions, and said it is considering additional cost cuts. Net income fell to €475 million ($541 million) from €543 million a year ago, the state-controlled Dutch lender said ...

Bloomberg While central bankers in Japan, Europe and US have struggled in recent years to stoke credit growth even as they grew their balance sheets to unprecedented size, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) is succeeding, with a very different approach. For all the Communist Party’s rhetoric about giving a decisive role to markets, China’s financial system remains dominated by ...