The Malaysian Insider

DUBAI, March 21 — Dubai’s debt restructuring proposal will determine the fate of UAE equity markets as the ailing emirate seeks support from Abu Dhabi, with markets poised to rally if the deal includes guarantees, analysts said.

Dubai’s index has been resurgent, gaining 12.8 per cent in 12 trading days, as investors bet a restructuring deal would be more favourable to creditors than once thought, but it is down 15.2 per cent since Nov 25, the day Dubai World said it would seek a debt standstill.

BEIJING, March 21 — Beijing will retaliate if the United States declares China a currency manipulator and imposes trade sanctions, Commerce Minister Chen Deming said today, firing the latest salvo in a spat over the value of the yuan.

Chen again accused Washington of politicising the issue ahead of an April 15 deadline for the US Treasury to rule whether China is unfairly holding down its exchange rate to gain a competitive edge in global markets.

After nearly six years of tantalizing Wall Street with its unbridled potential, Google is for the first time threatening to close off a key avenue of future growth if it shuts down its operations in China, the world’s largest Web market by users.

For the investors that have long celebrated Google’s status as one of the tech industry’s leading growth stocks, the situation in China is cause for some re-evaluation.

ORLANDO, March 20 — Regulators must be “significantly tougher” on large and complex financial firms to limit wider risks, but big firms are still needed to keep the global economy humming, US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said today.

Bernanke told an Independent Community Bankers of America conference that the problem of some firms being perceived as “too big to fail” is among the “most insidious” barriers to competition in financial markets.

UPDATED

KUALA LUMPUR, March 20 — Gua Musang MP Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah today claimed he was told that the national oil company, Petronas, has made a “very big discovery of an oil field, probably the biggest in the world”.

This discovery, he asserted, meant that Petronas would have a very good future. However, the founding chairman of Petronas declined to go into details.