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

  DUBAI / Reuters Most major Gulf stock markets were pulled down on Thursday by a 5 percent overnight slide in oil prices, while Abu Dhabi was hit particularly hard as heavyweights First Gulf Bank and National Bank of Abu Dhabi traded ex-dividend. Abu Dhabi’s stock index dropped 2.9 percent as First Gulf Bank tumbled 8.7 percent and National Bank ...

  Bloomberg European Central Bank optimism on global growth bolstered the euro and sent bonds lower as the prospects for more stimulus dimmed. US stocks rose even as oil slid below $50 a barrel for the first time this year, exacerbating a slump in commodities. Lenders led the S&P 500 Index to its first gain in four days, as the ...

  President Donald Trump’s economic adviser, Peter Navarro, has vowed to restore US manufacturing supremacy. This is no surprise — Trump’s election campaign emphasized the promise of a return to the industrial economy of the mid-20th century, before countries such as China supplanted the US as the workshop of the world. But this push is unlikely to succeed. Changes in ...

  France and South Korea are both members of the rich nations’ club that goes by the clunky name Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Measured by the participation of women in their banking and finance industries, they couldn’t be further apart. Among the 23 Korean companies for which Bloomberg has a breakdown of board and workforce composition, Samsung ...

  Like a lot of his plans, Donald Trump’s proposal for military spending is both abundantly clear and maddeningly vague. He wants to devote a whole lot more money to the Pentagon, as demonstrated by his budget outline and address to Congress. But the president’s plan is too ill-defined and arbitrary to make much sense. More military spending isn’t necessarily ...

  The trial of Jay Y Lee, the vice chairman of Samsung Electronics Co, in the bribery and influence scandal case began on Thursday. The prosecutors tried to prove Lee donated millions of dollars to charitable foundations controlled by Choi Soon Sil, a confidante of impeached South Korean President Park Geun hye, to help secure the control of Samsung Group. ...

  Bloomberg Co-Operative Bank Plc, the British lender that put itself up for sale last month, said it might look to raise as much as 750 million pounds ($912 million) by selling new shares and converting debt to equity if a buyer isn’t found. The bank may seek about 300 million pounds by selling new stock while asking bondholders to ...

  Bloomberg China’s central bank plans to apply a stricter method for assessing banks’ capital as part of efforts to contain financial-sector risks, people with knowledge of the matter said. Under the proposed change to the so-called Macro Prudential Assessment (MPA) framework, the People’s Bank of China will remove an intermediary category in its evaluation of banks’ capital adequacy, the ...

  ABU DHABI / Emirates Business Union National Bank (UNB), 50 percent owned by the Abu Dhabi government, will open its first branch in China next month, its chief executive said, as Gulf banks expand in the world’s second biggest economy. Union National has got approval from China’s central bank to convert its representative office into a branch in Shanghai, ...

  Bloomberg Indonesia’s central bank has cut borrowing costs enough to spur growth in the economy, Senior Deputy Governor Mirza Adityaswara said, giving his clearest signal yet that the bank’s easing policy is over as inflation pressures pick up. Boosting growth is “not about interest rates anymore,” Adityaswara said in an interview in Jakarta on Thursday. “We monitor the external ...