World

Select’s editorial team works independently to review financial products and write articles we think our readers will find useful. We earn a commission from affiliate partners on many offers, but not all offers on Select are from affiliate partners. A recent survey from Fidelity asked women adult women to share their actions and attitudes around money management. According to the 2022 Money Moves survey, 36% of women above age 36 say their biggest financial regret is waiting too long to start investing for retirement. Lorna Kapusta, Fidelity's Head of Women Investors, echoes this. According to Kapusta, a staggering amount of women share one other common financial regret. "Women often also regret waiting to set up a financial plan," she explains. "Seventy-one percent of women said once th...

JAKARTA : Long lines of trucks trying to unload palm fruit formed outside Indonesian processing mills this week, illustrating the growing cost of a palm oil export ban by the world's biggest producer. The trucks were stuck for days as storage space for palm oil neared capacity and, with local crop prices slumping by 70 per cent, farmers took to the streets to demand a policy change. President Joko Widodo has now agreed to lift the export ban, despite a bid to flood the local market with palm oil failing to bring down the price of cooking oil to a government target. "Ultimately, an increasing realisation that the export ban was starting to hurt palm oil producers without benefiting the end-consumers all that much prompted the reversal," Wellian Wiranto, an economist at OCBC Bank in Singa...

SYDNEY: Asian shares slid and the dollar hit two-decade peaks on Monday (May 9) as US stock futures extended their decline on rate worries, while a tightening lockdown in Shanghai stoked concerns about global economic growth and recession. "A series of rate hikes and hawkish communication came against a backdrop of plummeting Chinese and European activity, new plans for Russian energy bans and continued supply-side pressures," warned analysts at Barclays. "This creates the gloomy prospect of persistent inflation forcing central banks to hike rates despite sharply slowing growth." Chinese trade data for April were not quite as bad as feared, with exports up 3.9 per cent on the year and imports flat. However, there was no let-up in China's zero-COVID policy with Shanghai tightening the c...

The crypto market can be volatile, but it's still attractive to young people who have "higher risk appetites," said Chris Adam of SharpRank. Select’s editorial team works independently to review financial products and write articles we think our readers will find useful. We earn a commission from affiliate partners on many offers, but not all offers on Select are from affiliate partners. There's no doubt that there's a lot at hand contributing to the market's latest downward slide: 40-year-high inflation, rising interest rates, global economic uncertainty, war in Europe, an ongoing pandemic and now worries about a potential recession. The recent surge of market volatility has us all on our toes, leaving new and seasoned investors alike wondering what to do with their money when their inv...

JAKARTA: Indonesia will impose a domestic sales requirement for palm oil, the government said on Friday (May 20), a day after the world's biggest producer of the key edible oil reversed a ban on its export. President Joko Widodo's government has made several reversals on palm oil policy since November. The late-April export ban, an attempt to control high domestic cooking oil prices, shocked global edible oil markets and angered farmers as their product prices fell. Palm oil, used in everything from margarine to shampoo, comprises a third of the world's vegetable oil market, with Indonesia accounting for about 60 per cent of supply. Jokowi, as the president is popularly known, said on Thursday the three-week-old ban would end next week, even though the price of bulk cooking oil remains ...

WASHINGTON :The U.S. Senate on Wednesday moved to begin formal legislative talks on a long-stalled bill to pay for $52 billion in semiconductor chips manufacturing subsidies and boost U.S. competitiveness with China. The Senate completed votes on more than two dozen motions addressing a range of issues, including Iran policy. Although the motions are not binding, they convey a sense of what senators would like to see in the final bill and what could keep it from getting enough votes to become law. House and Senate lawmakers will now begin formal negotiations through a process known as a conference committee to hammer out a bill that can pass both chambers. Talks could last for months, congressional aides say. With Democrats narrowly controlling the House of Representatives and Senate, R...

JAKARTA: Protests were held at the Singapore embassy in Jakarta and the Singapore consulate-general in Medan on Friday (May 20), after Indonesian preacher Abdul Somad Batubara was denied entry to Singapore and sent back to Batam earlier in the week. Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) had said that Somad has been known to preach "extremist and segregationist" teachings. According to Indonesian media outlet Detik, the protest in front of the embassy started around 2.20pm local time on Friday with protesters carrying the Indonesian flag and handing out flyers listing their demands. The protesters, who are members of the Islamic Sharia Ideology Defenders (Perisai), called for condemnation of Singapore’s decision to deny entry to the preacher. They demanded that the Singapore embass...

HONG KONG : State conglomerate China Resources is in early-stage talks with Sihuan Pharmaceutical's chairman about jointly taking the Hong Kong-listed company private in a deal valuing it at nearly $3 billion, two people with knowledge of the matter said. Sihuan is attractive to China Resources (Holdings) Co Ltd, they said, due to sharp growth for its medical aesthetics business after the company became the exclusive distributor in China for Letybo, a botox product made by South Korea's Hugel Inc. China Resources and Che Fengsheng, Sihuan's chairman and largest shareholder, are considering offering HK$2.5 per share, the people said. That represents a premium of more than 60 per cent to the firm's average share price over the past three months of HK$1.53. But just how much China Resource...

HONG KONG: The euro gained a fraction in early trade on Monday (Apr 25) following French President Emmanuel Macron's comfortable Sunday defeat of far-right rival Marine Le Pen, the outcome largely expected by markets and political analysts. The euro opened higher at US$1.0840, was last trading at US$1.0807, up 0.12 per cent from Friday's close, but couldn't break far from a two-year low hit last week. The currency rose 0.14 per cent against sterling to 84.22 pence, hitting a three-week peak in early trade. With 97 per cent of votes counted, Macron was on course for a solid 57.4 per cent of the vote, interior ministry figures showed. In his victory speech, he acknowledged that many people had only voted for him only to keep Le Pen out, and he promised to address the sense of many French...

WASHINGTON: US President Joe Biden opened a gathering of Southeast Asian leaders with a promise to spend US$150 million on their infrastructure, security, pandemic preparedness and other efforts aimed at countering the influence of rival China. On Thursday (May 12), Biden started a two-day summit with the 10-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Washington with a dinner for the leaders at the White House ahead of talks at the State Department on Friday. Biden smiled broadly as he took a group photo on the South Lawn of the White House before the dinner with representatives from Brunei, Indonesia, Cambodia, Singapore, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines. While Russia's invasion of Ukraine is on the agenda, Biden's administration hopes the efforts will...