Bloomberg The priciest US gasoline may only be getting pricier. Since March 2017, filling up your car’s 20-gallon (75-liter) gasoline tank with premium has cost at least $10 more than if you’d pumped regular. The widening spread has been driven by additional demand for the fuel and by tightened air rules that have reduced supply. Those conditions are probably going …

MANAMA / Reuters Aluminium Bahrain (Alba) , owner of one of the world’s largest aluminium smelters, will raise by the end of this year’s first quarter the final debt amount needed to fund its Line 6 expansion project, a company official told Reuters. With Line 6, Alba will become the world’s largest single aluminium smelter complex, increasing production capacity by …

Bloomberg Chesapeake Energy Corp. shares jumped the most in almost two years, putting it on top of the S&P 500, after the shale explorer pledged to continue its push to cut spending and sell more assets in the year ahead. Chesapeake raised $1.3 billion last year from asset sales and has fired thousands of employees to cope with a burdened …

Bloomberg Federal Reserve officials are showing surprise at just how much the recently-enacted tax cuts are boosting the US economy. But they’re still not impressed enough to lift estimates for long-term growth, a stance that puts them at odds with the White House. Minutes from the January 30-31 meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee showed “a number” of policy …

Bloomberg InvestaBank, the Mexican lender that agreed in 2016 to buy Deutsche Bank AG’s Mexico units, is considering steps to renegotiate the $175 million purchase, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. The Mexico-based firm may seek to lower the price after regulatory changes wiped out most of the revenue the German lender generated through its monopoly on …

Bloomberg The US agency responsible for insuring bank deposits sued more than a dozen of the world’s biggest lenders, accusing them of contributing to the collapse of Puerto Rico’s Doral Bank by manipulating the benchmark Libor interest rate. The collapse of San Juan-based Doral was the biggest US bank failure of 2015. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., its receiver in …

Bloomberg Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc pays its female staff on average 37 percent less than men at the bank, joining Lloyds Banking Group Plc and Standard Life Aberdeen Plc in revealing an acute gender imbalance between employees under new disclosure requirements. Women at RBS receive average bonuses that are 64 percent lower than male employees, the bank said …

Bloomberg While Barclays Plc’s torrid 2017 ended on a mixed note, Jes Staley sees better things to come. Income from dealing stocks, bonds and currencies fell 18 percent, according to the bank’s fourth-quarter earnings report. That beat both the 26 percent decline estimated by UBS Group AG and the average 25 percent drop in markets revenue posted by Wall Street …

NEW DELHI / Reuters Saudi Arabia hopes OPEC and its allies will be able to relax production curbs next year and create a permanent framework to stabilise oil markets after the current supply cut deal ends this year, its oil minister said on Saturday. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries is reducing output by about 1.2 million barrels per …

Bloomberg Apple Inc., seeking to bolster its wearables business, is working on upgrades to its wireless AirPods headphones, according to people familiar with the matter. Like with its mobile devices—the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch—Apple intends to frequently update the AirPods with new hardware features. The Cupertino, California-based technology giant is working on a new version for release as soon …