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

  The surprise deal in which Qatar’s sovereign wealth and the commodities trader Glencore are acquiring 19.5 percent of Russia’s state-controlled oil company, Rosneft, has broad implications for Middle Eastern geopolitics, Russia’s domestic politics and the oil market. Russian President Vladimir Putin and his old associate, Rosneft chief executive officer Igor Sechin, have both won big on the deal, even ...

  The beatings will continue until morale improves, the saying goes. That’s one interpretation of the European Central Bank’s somewhat convoluted rejig of its quantitative easing program this week. By insisting he’s not tapering bond buying while simultaneously reducing the monthly purchases and extending the time frame, President Mario Draghi is sending a mixed message that likely reflects disagreements among ...

  In a speech to her party this week, Chancellor Angela Merkel said that Germany, “wherever legally possible,” ought to ban veils that cover the face, and emphasized that German law should not give way to Shariah law. Her audience cheered —but that only confirmed Merkel’s mistake. Pandering to grievances, real or imagined, rarely works. Sometimes it’s meant to soothe ...

  Rebel-held east Aleppo continues to be blitzed. The Syrian army tightened its grip on rebels besieged in Aleppo with thousands of civilians. The regime and Russian assaults on rebel enclave go unabated even as US Secretary of State John Kerry warned that regime’s ‘indiscriminate bombing’ amounted to crimes against humanity. US and Russian officials were expected to continue talks ...

  Automation may be gutting American manufacturing jobs, but there’s one thing the robots still can’t beat us at: people skills. It just so happens that the future of American labor will require a lot of them. The occupations projected to add the most jobs in the next 10 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, all require people ...

  When Walt Disney opened a monorail at his California Disneyland in 1959, he thought it would be the future of mass transit. For a long time, that seemed unlikely. Although a few cities have built successful monorails, for many people they remained synonymous with amusement parks, a notorious “Simpsons” episode and a future that never quite arrived. Thankfully, that’s ...

  Once upon a time, there was a lot of optimism that the blockchain — the technology underlying Bitcoin — would help the finance industry deal with a big headache: post-trade processing, the often long and arduous task of making sure money and securities change hands and everybody knows who owes what to whom. The problem might yet get solved, ...

  Reuters Stock markets in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar jumped on Monday as crude oil prices shot to their highest since mid-2015, but the uptrend in Saudi Arabia lost steam as investors anticipated the state budget. Brent crude soared as high as $57.89 per barrel on Monday morning in response to the weekend deal between OPEC and non-OPEC ...

  BEIJING / AP Stocks fell on Monday ahead of a Federal Reserve meeting that is expected to raise US interest rates, while oil prices jumped after several non-OPEC countries agreed to join the cartel in cutting output. KEEPING SCORE: Britain’s FTSE 100 was down 0.3 percent to 6,933 and Germany’s DAX shed 0.2 percent to 11,186. France’s CAC 40 ...

  Bloomberg Demand for plane tickets at Southwest Airlines Co. has climbed since Election Day, the carrier’s chief executive said, adding that he’s encouraged by President-elect Donald Trump’s stated plans to unwind regulations, cut corporate taxes and build infrastructure. “There’s definitely a lift in spirit,” Gary Kelly said in an interview at Bloomberg’s headquarters in New York, citing the stock ...