World

SAN SALVOR/NEW YORK : El Salvador's big bet on bitcoin, which the Central American nation has been buying since September, has soured in recent weeks as a cryptocurrency rout shaved over a third of the value of the government's holdings, Reuters calculations show. Under populist President Nayib Bukele, a vocal cheerleader for the currency, El Salvador went all-in on bitcoin, not just becoming the world's first country to adopt it as a legal tender but also sketching out plans for a volcano-powered crypto mining hub and plans to issue the first sovereign bond linked to the coin. With global borrowing costs on the rise and a big debt repayment on the horizon, El Salvador has other fiscal headaches than the impact of the currency's swoon. But the crypto slump has also closed some potential ...

LONDON: Tottenham's owners have invested £150 million (US$188 million) into the club as they try to satisfy boss Antonio Conte's demands for significant upgrades to his squad. Conte's side clinched qualification for next season's Champions League on Sunday as their 5-0 rout of Norwich sealed a fourth-place finish in the Premier League. But Conte has spent much of his time in north London hinting that Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy must provide him with major financial backing to sign "important players" as he looks to close the gap on champions Manchester City and Liverpool. Conte, who is under contract until the end of next season, has yet to pledge his long-term future to the club and it appears Tottenham's cash injection is designed to appease the notoriously demanding Italian. The ...

Aerial view of shipping containers and cranes at Qingdao Port on May 30, 2022 in Qingdao, Shandong Province of China. Han Jiajun | Visual China Group | Getty Images First, it was the pandemic. Then came the Russia-Ukraine war. With two major global crises back-to-back, there could be some lasting changes in supply chains and trade, experts warn. The war in Ukraine, in particular, has caused countries to think about the need for more dependable trading partners. "If the Covid-19 pandemic highlighted a need to shorten supply chains, the war in Ukraine underscores the importance to have reliable trading partners," said Peter Martin, research director at commodity research firm Wood Mackenzie. Energy prices soared this year as Russia's onslaught in Ukraine destabilized the markets and Western...

In this article MA For the first time since the start of the pandemic, global leisure and business flights have risen to levels not seen since 2019. That's according to the Mastercard Economics Institute's third annual travel report, titled "Travel 2022: Trends & Transitions," published yesterday. After analyzing 37 global markets, the report found that cross-border travel reached pre-pandemic levels as of March — a significant milestone for a travel industry that has been dominated by domestic travel since 2020. The data shows a "major recovery" is underway, said David Mann, chief economist for Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa at the Mastercard Economics Institute. "It is just pure evidence of just how strong the pent-up demand has actually been." Flights are back Global flight boo...

A WeRide robotaxi with health supplies heads to Liwan district on June 4, 2021, in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. Southern Metropolis Daily | Visual China Group | Getty Images BEIJING — While governments may be wary of driverless cars, people want to buy the technology, and companies want to cash in. It's a market for a limited version of self-driving tech that assists drivers with tasks like parking and switching lanes on a highway. And McKinsey predicts the market for a basic form of self-driving tech — known as "Level 2" in a classification system for autonomous driving — is worth 40 billion yuan ($6 billion) in China alone. "L2, improving the safety value for users, its commercial value is very clear," Bill Peng, Hong Kong-based partner at McKinsey, said Monday in Mandarin tr...

The Quad's MDA program may further militarize the Indo-Pacific region, where U.S. aircraft carrier USS Nimitz is seen here in a file photo leading a formation. Stocktrek Images | Stocktrek Images | Getty Images The Quad countries want to jointly monitor movements of ships and submarines in the Indo-Pacific using satellites, a move analysts warn could potentially lead to militarization of the region. "While the Quad as of now is not a security organization, it has the potential to quickly metamorphose into one," retired Maj. Gen. Dhruv Katoch of the Indian Army told CNBC. "If Chinese belligerence threatens ASEAN countries, then perhaps Southeast Asian countries too would be inclined to join such a grouping." The initiative's military nature is also underlined by the fact that the program i...

The company has raised more than $350 million in venture funding from investors including PayPal Ventures, GV, and Revolution Growth. In October, Tala closed a $145 million Series E funding round to further expand its borrowing, savings and money management options. At that time, Tala said it had lent more than $2.7 billion to more than six million people. Founded in 2011 by Shivani Siroya, the Santa Monica-based company uses its mobile platform to provide access to loans ranging from $10 to $500 to people in India, Mexico, the Philippines, and India. Using its Android app to create a credit profile for a user by looking at their texts, merchant transactions and other behavioral data to create a risk profile, Tala looks to approve loans within minutes compared to legacy banks or online l...

MUMBAI: Shares in Life Insurance Corp of India (LIC) slid 6 per cent in their market debut on Tuesday (May 17), a fresh setback for the state-owned giant after its IPO, while record-breaking, raised far less for the government than initially envisioned. India's biggest insurer and largest domestic financial investor was trading at 887 rupees as of late morning, giving it a market value of around 5.6 trillion rupees (US$72 billion) and making it the country's fifth-biggest company. The share price decline reflects a slump in the broader market since LIC's IPO opened for subscription on May 4. "We were not expecting a big listing as markets were jittery, expect it to pick up," LIC's Chairman M R Kumar told reporters. The government, which had positioned the sale as the first and biggest ...

WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called on Thursday (May 26) for vigorous competition with China to preserve the existing global order but said the United States did not seek a "Cold War". In a long-awaited speech billed as the most comprehensive statement to date on China by President Joe Biden's administration, Blinken said that Beijing posed "the most serious long-term challenge to the international order" despite months of US focus on Russia's invasion of Ukraine. "China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order - and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to do it," Blinken said at George Washington University. "Beijing's vision would move us away from the universal values that have sustained so mu...

PARIS: The war in Ukraine has made the growth outlook far bleaker even though the global economy should avoid a bout of 1970s-style stagflation, the OECD said on Wednesday (Jun 8), slashing its growth forecasts and jacking up its inflation estimates. The world economy is set to grow 3 per cent this year, much less than the 4.5 per cent expected when the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development last updated its forecasts in December. Growth will then slow further next year, easing to 2.8 per cent, down from a previous forecast of 3.2 per cent, the Paris-based policy forum said in its latest Economic Outlook. "Russia's war is indeed posing a heavy price on the global economy," OECD Secretary General Mathias Cormann told a news conference. "Global growth will be substantially...