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

  While everyone fixates on the U.S. election, developments in the world economy threaten to create problems for the next president and, possibly, trigger a major financial crisis. A little-noticed study by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) delivers the bad news. It finds that global debt — including the debts of governments, households and non-financial businesses — reached a record ...

The past few weeks of revelations about Donald Trump should convince you of the utility of Twitter’s platform. It is the new news ticker, the way information gets spread at the speed of light by the fastest typists. But that’s merely the networked and mobile technology. If you want to know how valuable the company is, you must ignore the ...

  Cheers rose from prominent voices around the world this month when almost all countries agreed to reduce the climate costs of international air travel. The United Nations and the White House applauded the deal, as did the airline industry and even some environmentalists. Yet the agreement hardly qualifies for the praise. It stands to do little to reduce carbon ...

  There were demonstrations and rallies on Sunday in France, Spain and Poland against the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) and EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). While TTIP is in limbo, CETA is to be signed on October 27. But it can only be struck when all 28 EU member states back it. Tuesday (October 18) ...

  Pontianak / AFP A striking bird with monochrome plumage and a formidable “beak”, the helmeted hornbill is being hunted to extinction, one of the latest victims of a thriving global trade in exotic wildlife. For decades poachers in Borneo’s western forests focused on capturing orangutans and sun bears, but in the past few years a surge in demand for ...

  Harare / AFP They sleep outside banks, skimp on meals and sell flowers in hospitals. After long years of work, Zimbabwe’s pensioners are struggling to survive old age as the country’s economy collapses. With banks short of cash to pay out pensions, 80-year-old Gift Kaondera-Shava, a former truck driver, bus conductor and factory supervisor, now scrambles to feed himself ...

CAIRO / AP For two weeks now, the shelf once piled with bags of sugar — for better or worse Egypt’s most loved commodity — has stood empty at this grocery store in bustling downtown Cairo. “This is nothing — they’re missing even more things in my village,” said Mahmoud Sulayman, a former army conscript from the Nile Delta now ...

  Reuters Vodafone Egypt and Etisalat Misr have signed licence deals allowing them to operate fourth-generation (4G) mobile services in Egypt, the country’s telecoms regulator said on Sunday. Egypt is selling four 4G licences as part of a long-awaited plan to reform the telecoms sector and to raise money for stretched government finances. The country’s three existing mobile phone operators ...

  Reuters Aluminium Bahrain (Alba) said on Sunday it closed a $1.5 billion loan with regional and international banks that will fund its Line 6 expansion project. 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 a sixth “potline”, used in producing the metal ...

  Kuwait City / Emirates Business GE marked a new milestone in its operational presence in Kuwait with the opening of the GE Kuwait Technology Center (GEKTC), a flagship facility that will foster localized research, provide hands-on training and build an innovation ecosystem specifically for the power sector. Approved by the Kuwait Direct Investment Promotion Authority (KDIPA) for a Foreign ...