Browsing: Business

MENA Newswire, NEW YORK: The U.S. dollar weakened broadly in late January trading as the Japanese yen climbed sharply, with investors focused on signs that officials in Tokyo and Washington were monitoring rapid currency moves. The yen’s surge helped pull the dollar lower against other major currencies, leaving the greenback near a four month low on widely followed measures of overall strength. The yen rallied nearly 3% across two sessions and was last trading around 154.6 per dollar after sliding as far as 159.23 on January 23. In New York trading on January 26, the dollar fell to 153.30 yen, its weakest level since mid November,…

MENA Newswire, NEW YORK: Elon Musk’s estimated net worth reached about $788 billion on Jan. 22, 2026, a record level on a widely followed real time wealth ranking after a rally in Tesla shares increased the value of his largest public stake. The estimate reflected end of day market prices and updated valuations used by the ranking, which tracks the paper value of founders’ holdings across public companies and private ventures. Tesla shares rose about 4% on Jan. 22 after Musk posted on X that Tesla had begun operating some robotaxi rides in Austin, Texas, without a safety monitor in the vehicle. A video circulating…

NEW YORK: New Federal Reserve data show the wealth gap in the United States widened to its largest level in more than three decades as rising stock and home values lifted the richest households far more than everyone else. In the third quarter of 2025, total U.S. household net worth climbed to a record $181.6 trillion, supported by a strong equities market and continued gains in real estate values. The increase added to a long-running trend in which assets that appreciate fastest are held disproportionately by households at the top of the wealth ladder. The Fed’s Distributional Financial Accounts show the top 1% of households…

WASHINGTON: U.S. Treasurys are confronting fresh political risk after President Donald Trump’s administration revived pressure on Denmark over Greenland and coupled it with threats of trade retaliation, prompting parts of Europe’s investment community to reassess exposure to U.S. government debt. The reassessment has fueled market talk that Europe could use its substantial Treasury holdings as leverage, even as confirmed selling to date remains limited to individual institutions rather than any coordinated government action. The renewed focus on Greenland has unsettled transatlantic ties in a period already marked by heightened sensitivity to Washington’s fiscal trajectory and policy volatility. In public remarks around the…

Davos: JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Jamie Dimon warned that a proposed cap on U.S. credit card interest rates would trigger an “economic disaster,” sharply criticizing President Donald Trump’s call for Congress to impose a 10% ceiling for one year as part of a consumer cost relief push aired at the World Economic Forum. Trump used his Davos appearance and related comments to press lawmakers to enact a temporary cap, arguing that credit card rates can run into the high 20% to low 30% range and that limiting borrowing costs would help households save, including for a housing down payment. The White House proposal…

STRASBOURG: The European Parliament has suspended its work to approve a pending European Union trade agreement with the United States, after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened new tariffs against European allies amid a dispute linked to Greenland. The decision halts planned committee steps needed for Parliament to set its position on the deal, pushing the transatlantic trade package into uncertainty at a moment of rising political friction between Washington and Brussels. The move centers on the Parliament’s international trade committee, which had been preparing to take votes later this month on elements tied to the agreement reached at a U.S.-EU meeting in Turnberry, Scotland,…

MENA Newswire, CALIFORNIA: Meta Platforms has cut about 1,500 jobs in its Reality Labs division, reducing headcount in the unit that develops the company’s virtual reality and augmented reality hardware, software and related content. The layoffs amount to roughly 10% of Reality Labs, according to reports published this week, and mark one of the largest workforce reductions inside the division since Meta began building it into a standalone organization. The job cuts have been reflected in state-level filings and employee notifications, including in Washington state, where hundreds of positions were listed as affected. Reality Labs employs thousands of people across engineering, product, content and operations…

MENA Newswire, WASHINGTON: A new study by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy finds that Americans, not foreign exporters, are paying nearly all of the cost of recent U.S. tariffs, as import prices rose almost one-for-one with the duties. The researchers estimate that foreign firms absorbed only about 4% of the tariff burden, while roughly 96% was passed through to U.S. buyers, challenging political claims that tariffs are financed abroad. The analysis draws on shipment-level records covering more than 25 million U.S. import transactions valued at nearly $4 trillion from January 2024 through November 2025. Using unit values and other shipment characteristics, the authors…

MENA Newswire, NEW YORK: The six largest U.S. banks trimmed their combined workforce by about 10,600 positions in 2025, the biggest annual net reduction on Wall Street since 2016, according to year-end headcount totals reported by the firms. The decline left JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley with roughly 1.09 million employees at the end of December, the lowest combined level since 2021. The staffing pullback came as banks continued to manage expenses after years of expansion that followed the pandemic-era rebound in markets and consumer activity. Compensation and benefits remain the largest line item for most…

WASHINGTON: More than seven years after President Donald Trump launched sweeping tariffs on Chinese goods, official data and widely cited economic studies show the measures raised costs inside the United States while leaving the core U.S. goods trade deficit with China largely intact. The tariff program began in 2018 under a federal trade law investigation and has remained a defining feature of the bilateral economic relationship through successive policy adjustments. Congressional and executive branch summaries show the United States imposed additional duties ranging from 7.5% to 25% on roughly $370 billion worth of imports from China, prompting China to retaliate on about $110 billion in…