A rise in overnight borrowing rates for trades that use Italian government bonds as collateral suggests that some of the country's banks may have started taking advantage of tiered ECB interest rates to make a profit. Tiered rates are one of the measures the European Central Bank has introduced to ease pressure on banks' margins caused by negative borrowing costs. The system allows eligible banks a 0% interest rate on part of the reserves they hold at the ECB, rather than applying the deposit charge that equates to the bank's base rate of -0.5%....
LONDON/BEIJING, Nov 8 (Reuters) - China is scouring the world for meat to replace the millions of pigs killed by African swine fever (ASF), boosting prices, business and profits for European and South American meatpackers as it re-shapes global markets for pork, beef and chicken. The European Union, the world's second largest pork producer after China, has ramped up sales to the Asian giant although it can only fill part of the shortfall caused by ASF....
(Bloomberg) -- PetroChina Co.’s Rudong terminal received its first cargo of liquefied natural gas in more than a month this week after its shut-down helped break the country’s 30-month streak of rising imports.A tanker, Gaslog Singapore, docked at the terminal in Jiangsu province Wednesday and departed the following day with a lower draft, ship-tracking data compiled by Bloomberg show, indicating it discharged LNG. It was the first ship to visit the port since late September, when a pipeline was damaged during a storm.The loss of the terminal, which is among China’s biggest, contributed to total gas imports dropping to 6.52 million tons in October, the first year-on-year decline since March 2017. Inbound shipments, including LNG and piped gas, were down 780,000 tons from October 2018, according to customs data released Friday. That difference may be mostly attributed to Rudong, which took in about 727,000 tons of LNG last October, compared with...
Honda Motor Co slashed its annual profit and global sales outlook to a four-year low, citing a firmer yen and bleak business in both India and its main market of North America, even as it unveiled plans to buy back $915 million shares. The dour outlook comes at a time when Honda is struggling to shore up its automobile operations, with its profitability down more than half in the past two years due to a series of quality-related issues constraining its financial firepower to invest in new vehicle technologies....
(Bloomberg) -- Canadian dairy giant Saputo Inc. is considering an acquisition to tap growing demand for plant-based beverages.After several acquisitions in the past two years, the Montreal-based company still has room on the balance sheet and is looking at three or four potential deals, including buying a plant-based beverage company, Chief Executive Officer Lino Saputo Jr. said in a telephone interview.“We need to understand that we’re servicing consumers and consumers’ tastes can change or be a bit more diversified,” he said.Saputo has milk operations around the world and had previously said it would be open to adding a plant-based business. Plant protein has taken off amid environmental and health concerns over dairy and meat.Globally, Saputo still has an eye on growth. The company currently doesn’t operate milk businesses in New Zealand, Brazil, Chile, Holland or Denmark, but is very interested in those markets, he said.Still, Saputo will only enter a new...
It might keep the economy running, but trucking has never been the most cost-effective industry in which to operate. Even with more than 60,000 jobs to fill and a driver shortage expected to double in the next decade, expenses keep going up: from an ...
