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

  The plight of the middle class is one of the hottest topics in the U.S. presidential campaign. Candidates compete to offer plans for the revival of the dependable middle, the foundation of society. The polarization isn’t only occurring in the U.S., though. In Germany, with its far more socialist income redistribution model, the middle class also is endangered. In ...

  Budgets can be austere things, as Australia’s was – or tried to be — in 2014. They can also be optimistic, about delivering surpluses or in this government’s case “jobs and growth.” Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his Treasurer Scott Morrison have delivered an optimistic budget. Or at least they delivered it optimistically, with Turnbull waxing lyrically if ...

  Catherine Putz SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS Ahead of the planned May 12 inauguration of the CASA-1000 project, the World Bank, one of the project’s main financiers, published a Q&A to try and provide answers to sustained criticisms of the project. The $1.17 billion CASA-1000 project aims to supply electricity from Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to Afghanistan and Pakistan via a ...

  BLOOMBERG U.S. stocks slipped after the biggest gain in two months, as global equities continued to churn just below multiyear highs amid corporate results and persistent signs that worldwide growth remains lackluster. Metals advanced as the dollar slipped. The S&P 500 Index retreated for the first time in four days, while European equities slid from a one-week high. Industrial ...

  ABU DHABI / EMIRATES BUSINESS The Emirates Securities Market Index has decreased by -0.46% to close at 4430.61 points. Accordingly the Market Capitalization has lost AED 3.3 billion attaining AED 720.89 billion. A total of 446.83 million Shares were traded with a total value of AED 0.58 billion during the trading session of 11-05-2016 through 6172 transactions. The number of companies ...

  Bloomberg ABN Amro Group NV reported a 13 percent decline in profit after its first full quarter as a listed company coincided with a market rout, crimping revenue from fees and commissions, and said it is considering additional cost cuts. Net income fell to €475 million ($541 million) from €543 million a year ago, the state-controlled Dutch lender said ...

Bloomberg While central bankers in Japan, Europe and US have struggled in recent years to stoke credit growth even as they grew their balance sheets to unprecedented size, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) is succeeding, with a very different approach. For all the Communist Party’s rhetoric about giving a decisive role to markets, China’s financial system remains dominated by ...

  Bloomberg A group of Gol Linhas Aereas SA’s bondholders views the Brazilian airline’s debt restructuring proposal as unfair and has hired US investment bank Houlihan Lokey Inc. to negotiate with the company, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter. The investor group, representing owners of more than 20 percent of Gol’s dollar notes, sees the plan ...

  Milan / BLOOMBERG Unicredit, Italy’s biggest bank by assets, said that net profit fell around a fifth at the start of the year due to restructuring costs in Italy and Austria. The charges — to the tune of some 230 million euros – weighed on the bank’s net profit in the first quarter, which came to 406 million euros ...

  Bloomberg ING Groep NV, the biggest Dutch lender, said first-quarter profit declined 29 percent on growing regulatory expenses and a loss at its financial-markets division. Net income dropped to 1.26 billion euros ($1.43 billion) from 1.77 billion euros a year earlier, the Amsterdam-based bank said in a statement. That compares with 1.24 billion euros, the average of seven analyst ...