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

  Bloomberg A glut of North Sea oil that’s helped depress global prices and heap pressure on OPEC is poised for short-term relief after traders booked tankers to take as much as half of the region’s key oil flow to Asia. Mercuria Energy Group Ltd. and Royal Dutch Shell Plc booked Forties crude onto tankers that typically haul 2 million ...

  KHOBAR / Reuters Saudi Arabia plans to more than triple the contribution of its mining industry to national wealth as measured by GDP by 2030, the energy minister said. The kingdom is finalising a mining strategy aimed at raising annual mining revenues from 64 billion riyals ($17.07 billion) to 240 billion riyals by 2030, Khalid Al Falih told reporters ...

  DUBAI / Reuters Saudi Arabian construction firm Abdullah Abdul Mohsin al-Khodari and Sons said on Tuesday that projects worth 362.2 million riyals ($97 million) had been delayed due to factors ranging from clients’ funding shortages to slow visa issuance. The pace of construction in Saudi Arabia has cooled in the past two years as lower oil prices stall project ...

  DUBAI / Reuters Aluminium Bahrain has approached banks for a $750 million loan towards the financing of its Line 6 expansion project, sources said. Alba will become the world’s largest single aluminium smelter complex, boosting its annual output by 540,000 tonnes to 1.5 million tonnes per year by adding the sixth “potline”, used in producing the metal from raw ...

  CAIRO / Reuters Pharmacies across Egypt are running short of medicines, some of them life-savers, as a plunge in the value of the Egyptian pound coupled with strict government price caps has made scores of products unprofitable to produce or import. The shortages include some cancer treatments as well as basic items like insulin, tetanus shots and contraceptive pills. ...

  The U.S. may have gone too far in pushing the European banking industry to play by American rules. Justified or not, these efforts are causing a protectionist pushback that probably won’t do global finance any good. European banks have been losing market share to U.S. ones, especially in investment banking, for years. Today, U.S. financial institutions are responsible for ...

  Financial markets have been surging the past two weeks, anticipating the potential for more stimulative economic policy after the spate of recent anti-establishment political surprises. Central bankers on both side of the Atlantic, while more restrained, also are preparing for measures that might produce both higher growth and faster inflation. Following his election as U.S. president, Donald Trump and ...

  China is America’s largest trading partner, and the U.S. is the largest partner for China. And while it’s true that our two countries have differences, we know that when we work together, we can accomplish extraordinary things. Cooperation between the U.S. and China, after all, is what made the Paris climate agreement possible. In the wake of the presidential ...

  On Wednesday, Britain’s finance minister Philip Hammond cut UK’s economic growth forecast for next year from 2.2% to 1.4%. The announcement came exactly five months after the June 23 referendum and rattled businesses in London. The UK economy has been in a tailspin as there continues to be ambiguity over the Brexit process. Even though British Prime Minister Theresa ...

  Here’s a suggestion for what should be among President Donald Trump’s priorities in Asia: Negotiate a free-trade agreement with China. You may think I’ve lost my mind. Hasn’t trade with China cost jobs and weakened U.S. industry, as Trump relentlessly argued during his campaign? Wouldn’t a free-trade pact only make matters worse? And isn’t the U.S. trade deficit with ...