Category: News

A wider Sino-U.S. trade dispute would help export-reliant Vietnam compete against Chinese companies but put the country at risk of any global fallout, analysts say. The numerous exporters in Vietnam that ship manufactured goods to the United States would save money compared with Chinese peers if not subject to American tariffs, said Dustin Daugherty, senior associate with business consultancy Dezan Shira & Associates in Ho Chi Minh City. The U.S. government said this month it would develop a list of tariffs on up to $60 billion in Chinese imports. China has threatened to impose its own in response. “Let’s say (the United States) went the more traditional route, tensions kept escalating and more tariffs are slapped on Chinese products,” Daugherty said. “In that case Vietnam’s export sector definitely benefits. We’re…

Corn has been dethroned as the king of crops as farmers report they intend to plant more soybeans than corn for the first time in 35 years. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says in its annual prospective planting report released Thursday that farmers intend to plant 89 million acres (36 million hectares) in soybeans and 88 million acres (35.6 million hectares) in corn. The primary reason is profitability. Corn costs much more to plant because of required demands for pest and disease control and fertilizer. When the profitability of both crops is close, farmers bet on soybeans for a better return. The only year that soybean acres beat corn in recent memory was 1983, when the government pushed farmers to plant fewer acres to boost prices in the midst of…

U.S. President Donald Trump attacked online tech giant Amazon, accusing the company of paying too little taxes and being responsible for putting retailers out of business. In a Twitter post early Thursday, Trump blasted the online retail titan, saying “I have stated my concerns with Amazon long before the Election,” adding, “Unlike others, they pay little or no taxes to state & local governments, use our Postal System as their Delivery Boy (causing tremendous loss to the U.S.), and are putting many thousands of retailers out of business!” Trump has a long history blaming Amazon for hurting traditional brick-and-mortar retailers. He tweeted last August, “Amazon is doing great damage to tax paying retailers. Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt - many jobs being lost!” For years,…

The world's largest passenger jet landed at Beirut's international airport on Thursday, bringing with it hope for a revival of Lebanon's vital tourism sector. The one-off Emirates Airbus A380 flight from Dubai was an acknowledgement of the substantial passenger traffic between Lebanon and Gulf nations, where many Lebanese nationals work and more pass through to destinations farther afield. Emirates said it scheduled the flight, the first of its kind to carry paying passengers, to see if Beirut's Rafik Hariri International Airport was ready to handle regular A380 service. Lebanese officials hope the results are positive, as tourist arrivals climb to levels last seen in 2010, before the uprising in neighboring Syria the following year raised fears of violent spillover. Lebanon welcomed 1.85 million tourists in 2017, according to the Tourism…

There is no sign that the United States is distancing itself from the World Trade Organization, and negotiations are underway to avert a global trade war, WTO Director-General Roberto Azevedo said in a BBC interview broadcast Wednesday. U.S. President Donald Trump has launched a series of tariff-raising moves, upsetting allies and rivals alike. Trump is also vetoing the appointment of WTO judges, causing a backlog in disputes and threatening to paralyze what is effectively the supreme court of trade. Some trade experts have begun asking whether Trump wants to kill the WTO, whose 164 members force each other to play by the rules. "I have absolutely no indication that the United Sates is walking away from the WTO. Zero indication," Azevedo said in an interview on the BBC Hardtalk program,…

U.S. President Donald Trump, who campaigned against economic agreements he considered unfair to America has his first trade deal. The United States and South Korea have agreed to revise their sweeping six-year-old trade pact which was completed during the administration of Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama. The agreement “will significantly strengthen the economic and national security relationships between the United States and South Korea,” according to a senior administration official in Washington. Trump had threatened to scrap the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA), calling it “horrible.” But officials of his administration on Tuesday confirmed key aspects of the agreement which officials in Seoul had announced the previous day. “When this is finalized it will be the first successful renegotiation of a trade agreement in U.S. history,” according to a senior…

For this ancient town on the southern edge of the Sahara, the flow of desperate migrants trying to reach Europe used to be a boon, not a burden. Abdoul Ahmed, a 31-year-old mechanic in Agadez, measured the good years in customers. When arrivals in Europe peaked in 2015, dozens of cars came to his workshop each day to get their tires changed before setting off across the desert. But since the European Union cracked down on migration a year later, his daily clientele has dropped to one or two. That earns him about $4, to be shared with five skinny teenage apprentices. "Times are bad. There's no activity," he said, sitting along one of the few paved roads in Agadez, a mud-brick town where beat-up motorcycles outnumber cars. For years,…

A growing American economy and passage of a Republican tax overhaul appear to be helping President Donald Trump lift his approval ratings from historic lows, according to a new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Trump remains unpopular with the majority of Americans, 58 percent. But 42 percent say they now approve of the job he's doing as president, up seven points from a month ago. That's a welcome change in trajectory for a White House that has been battered by chaos, controversies and internal upheaval. The poll suggests that at least some of the president's improving standing is tied to the economy, which has steadily grown and added jobs, continuing a trajectory that began under President Barack Obama. Nearly half of Americans surveyed — 47…

Uber Technologies has agreed to sell its Southeast Asian business to bigger regional rival Grab, the ride-hailing firms said on Monday, marking the U.S. company's second retreat from an Asian market. The industry's first big consolidation in Southeast Asia, home to about 640 million people, puts pressure on Indonesia's Go-Jek, which is backed by Alphabet's Google and China's Tencent Holdings Ltd. A shake-up in Asia's fiercely competitive ride-hailing industry became likely earlier this year when Japan-based SoftBank Group Corp's Vision Fund made a multibillion-dollar investment in Uber. SoftBank owns stakes in most major global ride services companies, and executives have indicated they favored consolidation. SoftBank already had investments in Grab and India's Ola, and Vision Fund Chief Executive Rajeev Misra had urged Uber to focus less on Asia and more…

White House officials are looking into whether $500 million in loans that went to Trump administration senior adviser Jared Kushner's family real estate company may have spurred ethics or criminal law violations, according to the head of the federal government's ethics agency. David J. Apol, acting director of the Office of Government Ethics, said in a letter sent late last week to Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi that the White House Counsel's office told him that officials were probing the loans to Kushner Cos. and whether "additional procedures are necessary to avoid violations in the future.'' Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat, had asked Apol on March 1 about a New York Times report in February that Kushner Cos. accepted $184 million in loans from Apollo Global Management and $325 million from Citigroup last…

Indonesia's strict crackdown on illegal foreign fishing boats is paying off, according to new research. Kicking out interlopers has relieved pressure on the country's overtaxed fisheries at no cost to its domestic industry, the study says, and may point the way for other countries to make their fisheries more sustainable. About a third of the world's commercial fish populations are overfished, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.  One study estimated that restoring depleted fisheries would ultimately generate $53 billion in additional annual profits.  But reducing overfishing usually means putting unpopular restrictions on local fishers to allow populations to recover. "Telling fishers to stop fishing for a few months or years would be something that's not that realistic," said study lead author Ren Cabral at the University of California,…

A delegation of Indian CEOs visiting Myanmar and the launch of a new India-Myanmar business chamber in Yangon have sought to inject life into stagnant economic ties between the two neighboring countries. Since 2011, when the military junta launched political and economic reforms, Myanmar’s future prosperity has been predicated on its strategic location between India and China, two giant economies and population centers. Yet, while China has poured billions into mega infrastructure and energy projects and continues to dominate trade with Myanmar, flagship Indian infrastructure projects in western Myanmar have run behind schedule and over budget. Bilateral trade — topped by beans and pulses from Myanmar and sugar and medicines from India — has hovered around the $2 billion mark since 2011, less than a fifth of the trade volume…