Singapore Property and Real Estate News Portal

ZURICH – Swiss bank UBS AG, under pressure at home to give up on hefty bonus schemes in the face of its poor performance, said on Monday it will introduce a more transparent pay system for top executives. The bank, which is struggling in the sub-prime crisis and whose shares slumped to a new all-time [...]

FRANKFURT – Global central banks are ready to take further steps to ease market tensions and bolster faltering economic growth, top policymakers said on Friday, as world leaders gathered for talks on the economic crisis. Speaking at a conference in Frankfurt, US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet said [...]

NEW YORK – Merrill Lynch & Co said on Friday that the majority of its best-performing financial advisors will join Bank of America Corp (BOA) when that bank buys Merrill at the end of the year. More than 6,200 advisors accepted a retention package offered by BOA that was targeted at the top-producing brokers, a [...]

Finance Minister says price of rice to rise in aftermath of Cyclone Nargis By Chio Su-Mei, Channel NewsAsia | Posted: 10 May 2008 2131 hrs SINGAPORE: Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam said the price of rice could increase in the immediate future because of Cyclone Nargis. However, he assured Singaporeans that the government is monitoring the [...]

Spike in prices hits Hong Kong shoppers, food industry Posted: 08 May 2008 0132 hrs HONG KONG : Shoppers and food suppliers in Hong Kong have have been feeling the pinch in recent months as food prices have skyrocketed, showing the port city’s vulnerability to global shifts in commodities markets. Hong Kong’s staple foods of [...]

One billion Asians affected by surging food prices Posted: 01 May 2008 0026 hrs MADRID : One billion people in Asia are seriously affected by surging global food prices, the director general of the Asian Development Bank, Rajat Nag, said on Wednesday. “This includes roughly about 600 million people who live on just under a [...]

UBS still faces risk from sub-prime crisis, says CEO Posted: 23 April 2008 1943 hrs BASEL, Switzerland : UBS, the biggest Swiss bank, warned on Wednesday that it still faced some risk from the US sub-rime crisis after wracking up losses exceeding 37 billion dollars (23.4 billion euros). Shareholders are gathered here for the annual [...]

UBS explains huge sub-prime losses in 50-page report Posted: 21 April 2008 1848 hrs ZURICH: Switzerland’s biggest bank UBS said on Monday that weak risk control and a pay structure that invited risky deals were among key factors leading to its massive sub-prime-related losses. A 50-page report to shareholders, a summary of a document the [...]

US sub-prime losses may total US$422b Posted: 16 April 2008 0451 hrs PARIS : Losses because of the financial crisis sparked by the US sub-prime mortgage crisis could rise as high as 422 billion dollars (267 billion euros), an OECD report said on Tuesday. That figure was far lower than the 945 billion dollars estimated [...]

IMF, World Bank meet as financial crisis bites Posted: 13 April 2008 0417 hrs WASHINGTON : The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank met here Saturday facing the challenges of a financial crisis battering the global economy and rising inflation hurting the poor. Sharply higher energy and food prices have complicated the problems confronting [...]