Author: Press Room

By Alex Lawler LONDON (Reuters) – The surprise oil output cuts announced on Sunday by OPEC+ members illustrate their greater power over the market, given limited supply growth by other producers such as U.S. shale firms and still-growing demand despite the energy transition. Oil has jumped to $85 a barrel since members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and allies including Russia announced production cuts of about 1.16 million barrels per day (bpd), adding to curbs already in place. While OPEC or OPEC+ decisions to cut output in the past have drawn warnings that higher prices and lower…

By Saqib Iqbal Ahmed NEW YORK (Reuters) -The U.S. dollar fell to a 1-week low against the euro on Thursday as German inflation data helped lift the common currency and as concerns over the banking sector receded. Inflation eased significantly in Germany in March on the back of lower energy prices but was above forecasts, adding pressure on the European Central Bank to further tighten its monetary policy. Separately, data showed that Spain’s consumer prices rose 3.3% year-on-year in March, the slowest pace since the 12-month period through August 2021 and less than expected by analysts. The European Central Bank,…

By Doyinsola Oladipo NEW YORK (Reuters) – Most Millennial and Generation Z travelers are planning bigger 2023 travel budgets but also growing more cost-conscious when booking flights and hotel accommodations, according to travel booking app Hopper. Early this year, U.S. travel companies told investors they saw no signs of slowing demand despite rising costs, but now, Hopper said, more customers are booking travel only when the price is right. The trend may eventually hamper growth for airline, hotel and leisure companies that have benefited from rising prices and pent-up demand. Some 84% of Hopper users, primarily Millennial and Gen Z…

Easter Sunday, a day during which Christians contemplate just just what it meant for the object of their faith literally to die before subsequently rising, seems a good day to think about death and rebirth both as metaphor and as aspiration. The impression is strengthened when one considers that adherents to the other Abrahamic faiths, as well as many Hindus, also are celebrating forms of Divine revelation and salvation right now. Resurrection as metaphor seems to be salient all around us right now. China is drawing all manner of attention, admiring and fearful by turns, as it raises itself from…

When President Biden used his first veto (less than 60 days after his party no longer controlled both houses of Congress), the media reported on the event with much fanfare. That it had to do with a very narrow subject didn’t matter. But was all the chest pumping justified? Could it be that the issue was already moot even before Congress passed the joint resolution that inspired the veto? On Wednesday, March 1, 2023, the Senate voted 50-46 to overturn the Department of Labor’s new Fiduciary Rule. This new Rule was to replace a similar Rule promulgated by the DOL…

The collapse and federal takeover of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB VB ) and Signature Bank is generating worries about where the next bank failures might occur. Will they hit smaller banks with high commercial real estate (CRE) exposure, as the CRE sector faces persistent economic challenges? And why do we continue seeing periodic financial sector crises? Concerns over small bank risks gained a lot of attention recently, when Goldman Sachs’ Richard Ramsden, the firm’s leader of the Financial Group in Global Investment Research, wrote a widely quoted cautionary note. Ramsden said he expects banks to “pull back on commercial real…

Every modern commercial real estate transaction, or other business transaction, takes place largely through email. If it’s a major or complicated transaction, it will involve dozens of email recipients and senders – business people, lawyers, brokers, title companies, other service providers, and so on. Each email will beget a stream of additional emails as each recipient replies, adds a little something to the discussion, and then sends their response to everyone. The bloated disclosures and caveats automatically added to the end of each new email response don’t help. It all becomes overwhelming. As one reaction to these massive email strings,…

Just For You Café, the San Francisco restaurant that inspired the animated sitcom “Bob’s Burgers”, closed down this week, partially due to soaring food inflation. The quirky breakfast joint, known for its New Orleans-style beignets and home-baked bread, was located in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco. It originally opened in 1980 and moved to its Dogpatch location in 2002.The café’s owner cited inflation and pandemic-related debt as reasons for its closure.  “The long and short of it is that we really haven’t been making money since COVID, and it’s just been kind of a battle,” Owner Reid Hannula told…

Check out the companies making headlines in midday trading.Nvidia – Shares of the chipmaker slid about 3% a day after Google revealed details about its artificial intelligence supercomputer and claimed that, compared to similar systems, it’s 1.2-1.7x faster and uses 1.3-1.9x less power than the Nvidia A100.related investing newsPalantir Technologies – Shares of the big data company, known for its many government contracts, fell about 5% after Palantir announced the expansion of its partnership with Microsoft to the public sector from the private sector. This development would give U.S. government customers and industry partners access to enterprise-grade capabilities by Palantir…

Google published details about one of its artificial intelligence supercomputers on Wednesday, saying it is faster and more efficient than competing Nvidia systems, as power-hungry machine learning models continue to be the hottest part of the tech industry.While Nvidia dominates the market for AI model training and deployment, with over 90%, Google has been designing and deploying AI chips called Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, since 2016.Google is a major AI pioneer, and its employees have developed some of the most important advancements in the field over the last decade. But some believe it has fallen behind in terms of…