ISTANBUL / Reuters Turkey and Iran’s central banks have formally agreed to trade in their local currencies, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said in a move aimed at increasing bilateral trade. Under the deal, the Iranian rial and Turkish lira will be easily converted to help reduce the costs of currency conversion and transfer for traders. The countries had been using ...

Bloomberg Japanese banks may have too many employees and branches, and overcapacity is contributing to a drop in earnings power that may hurt financial system, according to the nation’s central bank. “The low profitability of Japanese financial institutions is striking from an international perspective,” the Bank of Japan said in its twice-yearly financial system report. The number of employees and ...

Bloomberg Smaller Asian bond investors overlooked by banks are increasingly turning to exchange-traded funds to get exposure to fixed income, according to BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest money manager. “Banks are using their balance sheet for bigger institutions,” said Sean Cunningham, head of capital markets and fixed income for iShares and index investing in Asia-Pacific at BlackRock, whose assets under ...

DUBAI / Reuters Saudi Arabia’s National Commercial Bank (NCB), the kingdom’s largest lender, reported a 8.4 percent rise in third-quarter net profit on Sunday, helped by a fall in expenses and provisions for bad loans. The bank made a net profit of 2.13 billion riyals ($568 million) in the three months to September 30, it said in a bourse statement. ...

Bloomberg Ryanair Holdings Plc’s pilot uprising shows little signs of abating, with an ad-hoc group demanding that a wage increase offered to crews at London Stansted airport be doubled and extended across the budget airline’s European bases. The unofficial European Employee Representative Council made the proposal to pilots after cockpit crews at Ryanair’s biggest base rejected the existing offer, according ...

Bloomberg PT Garuda Indonesia is targeting a return to profit next year after a loss in 2017 as the flag carrier works to reduce expenses and operations improve. The airline is predicting a profit of $75 million in the second half ending December but won’t be able to post a profit for the 12-month period following a larger loss in ...

Bloomberg The deadline to submit proposals for Amazon.com Inc.’s second headquarters, dubbed HQ2, has arrived, and about 100 cities are expected to compete for the project. Amazon’s preferences for HQ2, which will cost more than $5 billion and create 50,000 jobs over the next two decades, include a metropolitan area with a population of more than 1 million, access to ...

Bloomberg Chocolates are cheaper for Halloween, but prices are likely to rebound by Christmas thanks to rising demand for cocoa beans. A global surplus sent cocoa prices plunging for most of the past two years, which helped to temper retail chocolate costs. There are signs that the overhang is beginning to ebb as consumers eat away the excess. Grindings, a ...

DUBAI / WAM His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of UAE and Ruler of Dubai, launched the flagship Dubai Internet of Things (IoT), Strategy, and the Data Wealth initiative to safeguard the emirate’s digital wealth and award Dubai Digital Certificates to outstanding government and private entities. The initiative, which was launched at Smart ...

Bloomberg The company that helped build entire neighbourhoods in Dubai plans to sell part of its business in the UAE in an initial public offering. Emaar Properties PJSC, which spearheaded a building boom in the emirate over the past 15 years and built the world’s tallest skyscraper in Dubai, will sell 20 percent of its real-estate development business, according to ...