Author: Steven Sahiounie

RIYADH: For the fifth consecutive month, Saudi Aramco raised the November official selling prices for the flagship Arab light crude it sells to Asia to plus $4 a barrel versus the Oman/Dubai average, the oil company announced on Thursday. The top oil exporter set its Arab Light OSP to Northwest Europe at $7.20 a barrel against ICE Brent for October and to the US at $7.45 versus ASCI. Saudi Arabia and Russia on Wednesday extended their voluntary oil cuts to the end of the year. The Kingdom will continue the voluntary cut of 1 million barrels of oil per day in…

RIYADH: Financial chiefs from across the region held discussions in Muscat on Thursday focused on enhancing economic cooperation and integration among members of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Oman’s Finance Minister Sultan bin Salem Al-Habsi presided over the 120th meeting of the Financial and Economic Cooperation Committee of the GCC. The Gulf ministers discussed several financial and economic issues related to their respective countries, including the outcomes of the committee meetings of the region’s central bank governors, along with that of the GCC Customs Union. The participants also shared views on the Gulf Common Market Committee. The ministers discussed tax exemptions…

NEW DELHI: Russia has overtaken the UAE to become India’s top naphtha supplier, data shows, as New Delhi takes advantage of discounted Russian oil products and the re-routing of trade flows in the aftermath of Moscow’s Ukraine invasion. The nearby UAE had long been India’s top source of imported naphtha, used to manufacture petrochemicals that end up as plastics and polyester fibers, while India previously bought little Russian naphtha because of high logistical costs. But this year, discounted Russian supplies in the aftermath of the EU’s sanctions on Moscow’s fuel imports as well as the higher cost of natural gas, an alternative…

NEW YORK: Surging US real yields are aiding the dollar’s rebound, rewarding bullish investors while making bears think twice before betting against the buck. The real yield on US 10-year Treasuries — which measure how much investors stand to make on US government bonds after inflation is stripped out — hit 2.47 percent on Tuesday, the highest in nearly 15 years, according to data from the US Treasury Department. That has made betting on the US currency more profitable, since bullish investors can collect yield while sitting on their dollar positions. The dollar is up 7 percent from its 2023…

RIYADH: Saudi Arabia’s Tadawul All Share Index continued its downward movement on Thursday, as it shed 75.42 points or 0.70 percent to close at 10,764.85. The total trading turnover of the benchmark index was SR4.10 billion ($1.09 billion) as 90 stocks advanced, while 121 declined. Nomu, the Kingdom’s parallel market, also shed 90.41 points to close at 22,667.94, while the MSCI Tadawul Index slipped by 0.40 percent to 1,382.44. The best-performing stock of the day on the main index was Al Rajhi REIT Fund. The company’s share price surged by 4.34 percent to SR8.42. Other top performers were Saudi Airlines…

RIYADH: In a significant stride toward a sustainable future, job opportunities in the renewable energy sector have nearly doubled over the past decade, reaching 13.7 million in 2022, up from 7.3 million in 2012, according to a recent report. The report, compiled by the International Renewable Energy Agency and the International Labour Organization, noted that this increase in job opportunities was driven by a surge in investments in the renewable energy sector in recent years. China accounts for 41 percent of jobs in the renewable energy sector globally, followed by Brazil, EU countries, India and the US. Breaking down the…

BAGHDAD: Iraq will ban cash withdrawals and transactions in US dollars as of Jan. 1, 2024, in the latest push to curb the misuse of its hard currency reserves in financial crimes and the evasion of US sanctions on Iran, a top Iraqi central bank official said. The move aims to stamp out the illicit use of some 50 percent of the $10 billion that Iraq imports in cash from the New York Federal Reserve each year, Mazen Ahmed, director-general of investment and remittances at the Iraqi central bank, told Reuters. It’s also part of a broader push to de-dollarize…

The analysis examined about 703,000 rental transactions between January 2018 and July 2023, including apartments and villas. RIYADH: Dubai’s residential rental market has experienced an upswing in activity over the past two years, ending a negative growth cycle that persisted from mid-2015 until late 2021, according to real estate services firm CBRE. In its latest report, the company disclosed that in the year-to-date figures up to July 2023, there was a 43.5 percent increase in the total number of tenancy contracts, reaching 325,727, compared to the agreements recorded during the same period in 2019. The analysis examined about 703,000 residential rental…

Washington’s protectionist trade policies reportedly threaten the region’s economic development East Asia’s developing economies are facing one of the lowest growth rates in five decades as a result of negative factors such as US protectionism and rising levels of debt, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing data by the World Bank. The institution cut its 2024 GDP growth forecast for East Asia and the Pacific on Sunday from the previously expected 4.8% to 4.5%. “The projections show that the region, one of the world’s main growth engines, is set for its slowest pace of growth since the late 1960s,…

The move by the OPEC+ leaders is aimed at rebalancing the market Saudi Arabia and Russia announced on Wednesday the extension of their voluntary oil output and export cuts until the end of the year, as tightening supply and rising demand drive oil prices up. The two countries, which are the leaders of the OPEC+ group of major oil producers, made announcements in separate official statements hours before a ministerial monitoring panel of the group was due to convene online. Riyadh said it would continue to cut its crude output by 1 million barrels per day (bpd). Production for…