The Gulf Time Newspaper One of the finest business newspapers in the UAE brought to you by our professional writers and editors.

  Bloomberg Consumers across the globe donning gloves to do the dishes may soon feel the heat from rubber being burned on China’s roads. Surging car sales in China in the last few months have more than doubled the price of a little-known chemical called butadiene. The colorless gas, used for making synthetic rubber, has soared in tandem with rising ...

  Bloomberg China home prices increased last month in the fewest cities since January last year, signaling property curbs to deflate a potential housing bubble are taking effect. New-home prices, excluding government-subsidized housing, gained last month in 46 of the 70 cities tracked by the government, compared with 55 in November, the National Bureau of Statistics said. Prices dropped in ...

  President Trump’s slash-and-burn actions in his first week have been dramatic, but dangerously lacking in a consensus of support, even within his own administration. The risks were evident in the collapse of a planned meeting with Mexico’s president and in Trump’s embrace of torture tactics rejected by his secretary of defense and CIA director. Trump’s ‘tweet from the hip’ ...

  Indian bank investors are in for a rude shock, and one that’s got little to do with the chaos unleashed by demonetization. The fault lies in shareholders’ own expectations, which, in Morgan Stanley’s words, are driven by “institutional memory.” The top three Indian private-sector lenders by assets — ICICI Bank Ltd., HDFC Bank Ltd. and Axis Bank Ltd. — ...

  With Britain poised to quit the European Union, Prime Minister Theresa May needs all the friends she can get. That helps explain her visit to White House, President Donald Trump’s first from a foreign head of state. The question is, what’s in it for him? Like so much else in the Trump era, this rapprochement is both unpredictable and, ...

US President Donald Trump issued an executive order barring most citizens from seven mainly Muslim Mideast and East African nations from entering the US. The nationals from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Sudan and Somalia won’t be able to enter the US for at least 90 days. The order will deny visas to Syrian nationals and halts the processing of ...

  Nearly a decade after the global financial crisis, the recovery remains disappointing and nothing — neither massive fiscal stimulus, nor record-low rates, nor generous injections of liquidity by central banks — seems to be helping. Policymakers from Washington to London to Tokyo all seem to agree there’s only one answer left: structural reform. Everywhere there’s talk of amending tax ...

  Tesco Plc’s move to acquire cash-and-carry wholesaler Booker Group Plc is a bid by Britain’s biggest grocer to tackle a serious problem that faces all of the nation’s big supermarkets. It’s also a cunning succession plan. The deal makes strategic sense. Tesco can transform some of the excess space in its big hypermarkets into Booker distribution centers. It’s not ...

  Some bold and simple policies have merit; Friday’s executive order that temporarily bans the citizens of certain countries from coming to the US, and stops indefinitely the entry of Syrian refugees, is not one of them. As designed and implemented, there are genuine doubts about the order’s effectiveness in meeting its stated objective of preventing terrorism. It also risks ...

  Bloomberg Alphabet Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp., which all posted quarterly results recently, reinforced what’s become a truism in technology: the biggest growth is in businesses that deliver computing over the internet. Microsoft topped projections on the strength of rising customer sign-ups for its cloud offerings like Azure, which saw revenue almost double. Intel sales rose more than ...