Investments

• Tuesday, December 20th 2016 - 08:57 UTC

  Brazil's Vale sells its fertilizer business to cut debt

  

  Brazil's Vale, the world’s largest iron ore and nickel miner said on Monday it will sell most of its fertilizer business to US-based Mosaic Co., the No.1 producer of phosphate fertilizer, in a deal worth about US$2.5 billion.

• Saturday, December 17th 2016 - 00:24 UTC

  Petrobras sells ethanol assets as it moves out of the biofuels industry

  

  Brazil's oil company Petrobras has agreed to sell its 49% stake in the sugar and ethanol joint venture Nova Fronteira Bioenergia SA to partner São Martinho SA, both companies said in securities filings on Thursday. Petrobras will receive 24 million new São Martinho shares as payment for the stake. Petrobras said in the filing that it will attribute a US$133 million value to the deal.

• Thursday, December 15th 2016 - 00:18 UTC

  Fed raises rate 25 points to 0.75%, anticipates further increases while US dollar jumps in Asian markets

  

  The U.S. Federal Reserve increased its benchmark interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point to a range of between 0.5 and 0.75%. The higher rate will affect the what savers and borrowers get on their variable rate products from banks, and the fine print of the bank's policy decision shows that a majority of Fed members expect more rate hikes to come, as many as three in the next 12 months, after previously signaling it was expecting only two.

• Tuesday, December 13th 2016 - 08:49 UTC

  First loan for an Andes tunnel to connect Argentina with Chile as part of Mercosur road net

  

  The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has approved a US$40 million loan that will allow for bidding to begin for the Agua Negra tunnel, which will connect San Juan province in Argentina with that of Coquimbo in Chile. The tunnel is key to improving trade integration between the two countries and the rest of Mercosur through a new corridor that will connect the Atlantic and the Pacific from Porto Alegre, Brazil, west to Coquimbo, Chile.

• Tuesday, December 13th 2016 - 07:51 UTC

  Another Goldman Sachs/Wall Street top official named to Trump's economic team

  

  Gary Cohn who was tapped Monday by President-elect Donald Trump to head the Gary Cohn , is second-in-command at investment banking giant Goldman Sachs, which he once hoped to lead. Cohn, 56, has worked on Wall Street since the 1990s and is one the firm’s best known public faces. He makes frequent television appearances to talk about the health of financial markets and the global economy.

• Saturday, December 10th 2016 - 12:30 UTC

  Santander announces new investment in Mexico's banking market

  

  Banco Santander has announced plans to invest 15 billion pesos ($735 million) in Mexico over the next three years despite market uncertainty as U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration draws nearer.

• Friday, December 9th 2016 - 09:47 UTC

  UK and Brazil underline significance of bilateral cooperation and initiatives in strategic areas

  

  British Secretary of State for International Trade, Dr Liam Fox, and the Brazilian Minister for Industry, Foreign Trade and Services, Marcos Pereira, emphasized the importance of current bilateral cooperation and agreed initiatives on strategic areas to support mutual economic development, during the 9th UK-Brazil Joint Economic and Trade Committee (JETCO) meeting held in Brasília this week.

• Thursday, December 8th 2016 - 19:01 UTC

  Russia sells 19.5% of Rosneft - ‘biggest privatization deal of 2016,’ says Putin

  

  Russian President Vladimir Putin labeled the sale of 19.5% of state-owned oil giant Rosneft's shares to the natural resource trader Glencore International and a Qatari sovereign wealth fund for over $11 billion was “the biggest sale and acquisition in the world’s oil and gas sector in 2016,” the official Kremlin website reported Wednesday.

• Wednesday, December 7th 2016 - 12:16 UTC

  Japanese tech firm meets Trump and pledges to invest US$ 50bn in the US

  

  Shares of Japanese technology firm Softbank have soared to their highest level in more than one year in Tokyo trade, jumping 5% at the open. That is on news Chief Executive Masayoshi Son said he will invest US$50bn in US businesses. But details are lacking on where the money will go and how it will benefit American businesses.

• Saturday, December 3rd 2016 - 09:53 UTC

  Two Chinese large-scale jiggers heading for the SW Atlantic, announces Pingtan

  

  China's Pingtan Marine has announced the launch of two new squid jiggers, bound for the southwest Atlantic and southeast Pacific oceans. The two newly-completed vessels should reach fishing grounds by late December, and sales of squid catches are then expected to begin in the first quarter of 2017.