What’s the world’s most widely used cryptocurrency? If you think it’s Bitcoin, which accounts for about 70 percent of all the digital-asset world’s market value, you’re probably wrong. While concrete figures on trading volumes are hard to come by in this often murky corner of finance, data from CoinMarketCap.com shows that the token with the highest daily and monthly trading volume is Tether, ...

The risk of a property bubble in the eurozone surged last year as ultralow interest rates helped drive up house prices. Munich is now the city most vulnerable to a property bubble, according to UBS Group’s annual Real Estate Bubble Index. Frankfurt and Paris are increasingly in danger of prices becoming unsustainable, even as some of the priciest cities around the world cool, the report said. ...

Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi group last week attacked two plants at the heart of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry in a strike that could impact about 5 million barrels per day of crude production - close to half of the kingdom’s output, or 5 percent of global oil supply. The Saudis are the world‘s biggest oil exporters, sending more than 7 million barrels of crude to numerous destinations around the...

NEW YORK (AFP) -- US stocks went nowhere on Thursday as investors lost their appetite in afternoon trade, a day after the US central bank delivered a widely expected shot of stimulus. At the close, the benchmark Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 0.2 percent at 27,094.79, erasing earlier gains in the day. Meanwhile, the broader S&P 500 was flat, hovering near record levels at 3,006.79, while...

Drones attacked the world’s largest oil processing facility in Saudi Arabia and a major oilfield operated by Saudi Aramco last weekend. Aramco is the biggest energy company in the world. It produces and exports more than 9.5 million barrels of Saudi Arabia’s oil per day to consumers around the world, primarily in Asia.

WASHINGTON (AFP) -- The pace of downsizing at American companies surged last month, with more than 10,000 job cuts blamed on “trade difficulties” alone, according to figures released Thursday. Employers also announced the most layoffs of any August since 2009, the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said. Job cuts rose 38 percent over July, with 53,480 positions to be slashed from em...

The US and Poland signed an agreement on Monday to cooperate on new 5G technology amid growing concerns about Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei. Vice President Mike Pence and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki signed the deal in Warsaw, where Pence is filling in for President Donald Trump, who scrapped his trip at the last minute because of Hurricane Dorian. The signing comes amid a...

BIARRITZ, France — President Donald Trump, facing pressure to scale back a US-China trade war contributing to a global economic slowdown, claimed Monday that serious talks will begin soon although another round has been expected in Washington in September. Trump said his trade negotiators had received two “very good calls” from China on Sunday. But a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry said M...

Vital for smartphone screens, electric vehicle batteries and wind turbines alike, rare earths are highly sought after. These metals and elements have become indispensable for many advanced industries. About 35 percent of the world’s rare earth reserves are in China, which produced 120,000 metric tons, or 70 percent, of the global supply in 2018. (AFP)

Samsung Electronics ranked second in terms of the number of patents filed in the United States last year, a report by a US patent association showed. Samsung registered 5,836 patents in the US last year, trailing behind IBM with 9,088 patents, the Intellectual Property Owners Association said. Samsung’s rival LG Electronics was the seventh-largest patent holder with 2,473, moving up one not...

South Korea’s coal consumption increased last year, bucking the global trend for reducing carbon emissions, a report showed. South Korea consumed 88.2 million tons of oil equivalent, a unit of energy, in 2018, up 2.4 percent from a year ago, according to the London-based energy company BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy 2019. The latest figure makes South Korea the world’s fifth-largest...

South Korea’s electronics output was the world’s third largest in terms of value last year thanks to brisk sales of memory chips, an industry report showed. The total production of the electronics industry in Asia’s fourth-largest economy came to $171.1 billion in 2018, accounting for 8.8 percent of the global market, the Korea Electronics Association said in the report. China’s electronics ...

Huawei Technologies remained the No. 2 global smartphone vendor in the past quarter despite tough US sanctions imposed on the Chinese technology giant, market trackers said. The Chinese firm managed to boost its sales even as the overall market declined, remaining on the heels of sector leader Samsung and ahead of US-based Apple. According to Strategy Analytics, overall global smartphone sal...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Global trade tensions, continued uncertainty and rising prospects for a no-deal Brexit are sapping the strength of the world economy, which faces a "precarious" 2020, the International Monetary Fund warned on Tuesday. Trade conflicts are undercutting investment and weakening manufacturing, and the IMF urged countries to avoid using tariffs to resolve their differences. In the...

US retail giant Amazon has overtaken tech titans Apple and Google to become the world’s most valuable brand, according to a survey. The brand value of Amazon surged 52 percent to $315 billion, global market research agency Kantar said in its 2019 100 Top BrandZ report. Amazon jumped from third to first place to eclipse Google, which slid from first to third place. Apple held on to the second...