World

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...

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TOKYO : Japan's factories posted a sharp fall in output in April as China's COVID-19 lockdowns and wider supply disruptions took a heavy toll on manufacturers, clouding the outlook for the trade-reliant economy. Separate data showed retail sales posted the largest rise in nearly a year as consumers stepped up spending after the government eased pandemic curbs, withstanding pressure from wider price rises that threaten to hurt demand. Factory output dropped 1.3 per cent in April from the previous month, official data showed on Tuesday, on sharp falls in the production of items such as electronic parts and production machinery. It was the first fall in three months and much weaker than a 0.2 per cent decline expected by economists in a Reuters poll. The data comes a day after Toyota Moto...

1. Wall Street set to open lower as bond yields remain high Traders work on the floor of the NYSE, June 6, 2022. Source: NYSE 2. Target shares sink after the retailer warns about earnings A person walks into a Target store in Washington, DC, on May 18, 2022. Stefani Reynolds | AFP | Getty Images Target warned Tuesday that earnings will take a short-term hit as the retailer marks down unwanted items, cancels orders and takes aggressive steps to get rid of extra inventory. Target anticipates its operating margin rate for the fiscal second quarter will be around 2%. That's lower than the outlook it gave less than three weeks ago when it reported a wider fiscal first-quarter earnings miss, which sent the stock down roughly 25% in its worst single-day performance on Wall Street since 1987. ...

SINGAPORE: Inflation will become a very serious problem for the world if measures are not taken to address it, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said in an interview with Nikkei Asia on Friday (May 20). Highlighting the challenges of tackling inflation, Mr Lee said: “The difficulty is that now that inflation is quite high, you need quite drastic measures in order to bring it back down and to prevent inflationary expectations from taking root. “It is very difficult to do that and have a soft landing. There is a considerable risk of your doing what you need to do but the result is provoking a recession.” He added: “It's happened repeatedly in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. So that is a risk which we have to anticipate and watch out for. But ... you have to take that risk because if you do not act a...

SINGAPORE: A former Singtel employee was on Tuesday (Jun 14) jailed for one year and eight months for cheating his friends into signing up for mobile plans and giving him the phones they received. While on bail for those offences, Aloysius Nah Ming Yuan also posed as a woman on dating apps and cheated two men into paying him for sexual services, and swindled a Carousell seller. The 28-year-old pleaded guilty to 10 counts of cheating, with another 16 charges considered for sentencing. The court heard that Nah used to work as a customer service officer with Singtel. In 2017, Nah decided to deceive his friends into signing up for mobile service plans with various telecommunication companies. He lied to his friends that they would not be charged any fees, and got them to pass him the phon...

SHANGHAI/HONG KONG : As Chinese authorities signal that a two-year crackdown on the domestic technology sector is over, global investors are relieved and yet loath to take the government at its word. Foreign investors have been returning to mainland markets since May as its stringent COVID-19 lockdowns ease and after pledges from China's highest policymakers, including Vice Premier Liu He, to support an economy staring at recession. More explicit signs that the regulatory crackdown that crippled the technology sector is easing came this week with reports ride-hailing firm Didi Global and billionaire Jack Ma's Ant Group, the fintech affiliate of conglomerate Alibaba, are getting out of the regulatory doghouse. Yet, the lure of a battered and cheap market and the prospect of domestic econ...

British Union flag, also known as a Union Jack, and an American flag at ETX Capital, a broker of contracts-for-difference. The pound has fallen more than 8% against the dollar, and is attracting short bets from traders as the British economy faces soaring inflation and a cost-of-living crisis. Chris Ratcliffe | Bloomberg | Getty Images "The ECB is just coming out of negative rate territory and we think there are non-linearities to doing that, where the BOE is already in positive rate territory — we don't think they can really hike all that much further," Zief said. "So even though we do think sterling recovers a bit against the dollar come the end of this year, we have really been trading sterling short on the crosses, so long commodity-sensitive currencies, growth-sensitive currencies or...