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LISBON / Bloomberg Portugal just can’t shake off its bears. The nation’s bonds are underperforming their counterparts across the euro area even as a recovery in stocks and oil prices boosted demand for higher-yielding assets. The extra yield, or spread, that investors get for holding Portuguese 10-year bonds instead of the benchmark German bund climbed for the first time in ...

Mayibouth / AFP In the remote wilderness of the Belinga mountains in northeast Gabon, men with shovels in hand dig from morning to night, filling wheelbarrows with soil laced with what they are looking for: gold. The clearing in the equatorial forest is covered with dozens of holes, some four metres (13 feet) deep. “We arrive around seven in the ...

AlmerIa / AFP In a vast sea of plastic greenhouses in southeastern Spain, dubbed “Europe’s vegetable garden”, discontent is growing among farmers who complain large supermarket chains do not pay enough and farm workers live in poverty. Since the 1980s, one of the largest concentrations of greenhouses in the world has developed on a coastal plain near the city of ...

When Chinese President Xi Jinping unveiled the blueprint for the enormous $46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project last year, Pakistan was understandably pleased. The Pakistani government considers the project a game changer for its fragile economic structure. This exhilaration partly stems from the country’s wobbly economic performance in recent years, which has seen it fall short of GDP and ...

Peter Sands, the former chief executive officer of Standard Bank, is among those who want to abolish high-denomination currency notes, “the preferred payment mechanism of those pursuing illicit activities.” In the wacky world of negative interest rates, though, pallets of hundred- dollar bills and 500 euro notes are poised to become a fashionable store of value for any cash-rich company ...

Kurt Campbell, then-assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, e-mailed then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands on October 2, 2012 – less than a month after the Japanese central government nationalized the islands – it was revealed in the latest batch of emails released by the U.S. State Department. Campbell wrote, “We assess ...

Bloomberg Chinese lenders are reacting to a regulatory crackdown on shadow financing by increasing activity in their more opaque receivables accounts, a practice Commerzbank AG estimates may result in losses of as much as 1 trillion yuan ($153 billion) over five years. Banks are increasingly using trusts or asset management plans to lend and recording them as funds to be ...

Bloomberg Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. (OCBC) rallied after fourth-quarter profit rose more than analysts anticipated. Shares of its two large Singapore rivals fell. The bank’s stock surged on Wednesday by the most in almost six months following the release of an exchange statement showing net income climbed 21 percent on higher interest and trading income as well as gains from life ...

AMSTERDAM / AP ABN Amro, the Dutch bank that began a phased return to the market last year, says its 2015 net profit soared 70 percent to 1.9 billion euros ($2.1 billion), despite rising regulatory costs. Chairman of the bank’s managing board Gerrit Zalm said Wednesday that “2015 was a good year for the bank.” Operating income rose 5 percent ...

Washington A Federal Reserve regional president called for the dismantlement of big banks whose failure could pose serious risk to the global financial system. Neel Kashkari, who took office as president of the Minneapolis Fed on January 1 and was a top Treasury official during the 2008 financial crisis, said in a speech that “bolder, transformational options” must be considered ...