Bloomberg PPC Ltd is in the final stages of negotiating a 2 billion rand (SU$132 million) bridging guarantee facility, seeking to shore up its balance sheet after a credit-rating cut and warnings of a possible liquidity squeeze. South Africa’s biggest listed cement maker is also working on a plan to raise 3 billion rand to 4 billion rand and ...

  Bloomberg Banks took 2.46 billion pounds (US$3.5 billion) in the first of three extra liquidity operations the Bank of England is holding this month to shore up funding as the UK considers its future in the European Union. Governor Mark Carney is offering the cash — in exchange for collateral — as a precaution to help ensure the smooth ...

  Bloomberg JPMorgan Chase & Co. has joined USA rivals including Bank of America Corp and USA Bancorp in letting customers transfer money between the lenders in real time, challenging ventures including PayPal Holdings Inc’s Venmo. JPMorgan, whose Chase QuickPay product handled US$20 billion in peer-to-peer transfers last year, began offering the service after customers requested it, said Barry Sommers, ...

  Bochum / DPA Instead of a vase with fresh flowers on her dining room table, Shia Su has collected the rubbish of the past few months. In a glass jar are a few bottle caps, receipts and window envelopes – you can’t avoid all rubbish, she says. But the jar is big enough to hold an entire year’s worth ...

  Lisa Abeyta Tribune News Service As an entrepreneur, one of our primary jobs is to become excellent researchers. The thing about creating something from nothing, about building a business where none existed before, is that there will always be myriad unknowns, so learning how to independently search for answers if a vital skill. Startups don’t come with ready-made worksheets, ...

  Shanghai / Bloomberg China’s near-term economic outlook is being buoyed by policy support even as its medium-term prospects become more uncertain because of rapidly rising credit, excess industrial capacity and financial sector risks, the International Monetary Fund said. Overall reforms have advanced impressively in areas from shifting to services as a greater driver of growth to liberalization of financial ...

  New Delhi / AFP India’s consumer prices rose faster than expected in May due to higher food costs, official figures showed, which will likely lead the central bank to hold off lowering interest rates. The inflation rate increased to 5.76 percent from a year earlier, substantially higher than the 4.8 percent recorded in March and 5.4 percent in April, ...

  BEIJING / AP Chinese and American officials said on Tuesday they’re committed to bridging their differences on cybersecurity and moving to implement recent agreements, as they held talks amid complaints over China-based hacking operations that the US says may have already cost US companies tens of billions of dollars. Repeated meetings between the sides on cybersecurity indicate the seriousness ...

  Tokyo / Bloomberg Coal is set to overtake gas within the next three years as the largest generator of power in Japan as power utilities replace aging nuclear capacity with the fossil fuel, Bloomberg New Energy Finance said. Nuclear power, which accounted for about 29 percent of Japan’s total power output before the 2011 Fukushima disaster, will peak at ...

  New Delhi / AFP Scientists from Britain and India will release underwater robots into the Bay of Bengal in a bid to more accurately predict the Indian monsoon critical to millions of farmers, they said on Tuesday. Researchers will also fly a plane packed with scientific equipment over the bay to measure the atmosphere as part of the multi-million ...