admin
Friends come and go. Some just drift off, but there are a few that really disappoint you as President Trump has found out.Israel’s PM Netanyahu has been described as ‘you’re crazy’ by President Trump.It would
admin
Guyana was already the world’s fastest growing economy before the US-Israeli war on Iran drove up oil prices. Now, the tiny Caribbean nation of nearly 1mn people will reap an even bigger bonanza as the conflict reshapes global energy markets. The war that caused one of the largest energy disruptions in history highlights the growing importance of countries including Guyana that offer political stability and geographically unrestricted access to their estimated 11bn barrels of oil reserves. This growing windfall from crude brings pressure from business owners and locals on the government to use its billions of dollars to boost other parts of the economy. “The world has seen too many energy booms that left behind ghost towns, depleted forests and bitter populations. Guyana will not be that story,” President Irfaan Ali said in an address at Rice University’s Baker Institute this month. Rapid development by an Exxon Mobil-led oil consortium, which controls all of Guyana’s oil production, grew output to over 900,000 barrels per day in just seven years, a pace without recent precedent as offshore projects can typically take twice as long just to produce the first drop of oil. Guyana’s GDP more than quadrupled to $27.5bn between the time the taps started flowing in 2019 to 2024, according to World Bank data. Guyana was previously one of the poorest countries in South America and oil-fueled growth can be seen across the capital of Georgetown, where construction is taking place on new modern office buildings, upscale hotels and rows of single-family homes that resemble those that could be found in US suburbs. Exxon billboards and ads for other petroleum companies play on the radio, serving as reminders for the industry that helped enable the growth. MORE MONEY, MORE PROBLEMS?The government’s long-term challenge is to fortify the country against an implicit pitfall — the economic cycle of boom and bust oil prices. Guyana needs to look no further than its neighbor Venezuela for an example of how political dysfunction and overreliance on oil money can cripple an economy despite having one of the largest estimated oil reserves in the world. One of Guyana’s strategies is its 2019 sovereign wealth fund holding all oil revenue which allows the government to draw funds for development projects at a steady rate. Crude prices, up 30% since the start of the Iran war in late February, could further swell Guyana’s oil revenue. Assuming an oil price of $100 per barrel through the rest of the year at current production volumes, Guyana’s share of oil revenue could be worth roughly $4.3bn, 67% higher than last year, according to Reuters calculations. More importantly, Guyana is poised to start receiving a significantly larger share of oil production earlier than expected. The Exxon consortium currently takes 75% of the oil to recoup its initial exploration and development costs. And now, the consortium could recover the costs this year, Exxon has said. When that happens, the country’s share of the profit oil will climb from 12.5% to 50%. Ali cautioned that expectations needed to be managed, as any windfall due to higher oil prices would be offset by higher import costs for nearly all goods including fuel and fertilizer. “This is the complexity of the messaging when people wake up every morning and see the headlines that you’re flush with money, it drives a certain expectation,” he said in his Baker Institute address. Some local infrastructure has not improved at the same pace that the oil industry has developed. Open sewage drains line the streets of Georgetown and electricity outages remain a common occurrence. A ‘CHANGED WORLD’Guyana sits at the centre of a region that includes the established oil and gas economies of Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago, as well as Suriname, where the sector is emerging. The area benefits from direct, unrestricted access to the Atlantic, without maritime chokepoints vulnerable to blockades like the Strait of Hormuz. Guyana’s low break-even prices in the $25 to $35 per barrel range, and proximity to US markets that are supportive of fossil fuel development, further compound long-term advantages, said Tarron Khemraj, a professor of economics and international studies at the New College of Florida, who has studied Caribbean countries including Guyana. Spot prices for Guyana’s four crude grades — valued for their light to medium sweet quality — have surged over the past three months, with the Liza benchmark reaching a high of $120 per barrel from $68.98 on February 27 before the conflict in the Middle East began. Even if traffic through the Strait of Hormuz resumes soon and oil prices return to pre-war levels, experts say Guyana’s track record as a geopolitically stable source of oil will further solidify. “The war may end next month, but it will be a changed world,” Khemraj said. Still, numbers that look like a boom may belie the full reality of the broader economy. While Guyana has recorded double-digit percentage GDP growth each year since oil production began, most of that expansion has been concentrated in the petroleum sector, rather than broad-based activity. Oil and gas and support services accounted for more than 75% of the country’s GDP last year, according to government data. SHARING THE WEALTHAs part of its effort to make sure more of the oil revenue trickles down, the government is also moving to expand its local content law, originally passed in 2021, that requires oil and gas firms to contract with Guyanese-owned suppliers and vendors in a number of specific areas, such as janitorial, food or transportation. The regulation requires petroleum companies to procure a certain percentage of services from Guyanese businesses, for example, 25% of medical services and 90% of catering services. The government is considering amendments to add more service areas and increase the percentage requirements for some existing ones, Michael Munroe, director of the local content secretariat, said in an interview. Business owners say that expanding the requirements will help support more jobs and the development of skilled labour. “We’re able to provide all of the same medical services as an international company,” said Ayesha Wilburg, founder and CEO of a Georgetown-based health clinic. Rising oil activity has also led to a similar explosion in demand for private transportation services in Georgetown, where residents often travel by cab. Nazim Baksh, general manager of Sean’s Transportation Services, said the company expanded from seven employees to about 20 and also upgraded its fleet from sedans to add more SUVs. Challenges remain, however, including complaints from Guyanese business owners about so-called fronting. Panelists at the Guyana Energy Conference in February acknowledged the problem, where foreign companies use local entities but retain actual control of the business. Vanita Ally, medical director and founder of Phoenix Clinicare, a Guyanese-owned medical center, said that receiving a certificate to provide services to oil firms has not resulted in much additional revenue and inflation is also increasing her operating costs. “International companies are benefiting a lot more than local people (from the oil industry),” Ally said. Drivers are now paying more at the pump, like other countries, adding to cost of living concerns. Guyana lacks a refinery and must import gasoline, diesel and other refined products.
admin
India’s red-hot initial public offering market may look irresistible as foreign firms line up for listings, but the rush is not about raising funds to expand in a fast-growing market; it’s about sending billions of dollars back to headquarters. Just one of six foreign-based companies that listed their Indian units in Mumbai since 2024 raised new funds, with all others structured purely as secondary offerings — or offer for sale (OFS), where existing shareholders sell their holdings to the public without raising any new funds, according to data from Prime Database, an Indian market research firm. Foreign-based parents of companies that have long invested in India pocketed nearly $5bn through such secondary-offering IPOs, with Hyundai Motor and LG Electronics accounting for more than 80% of those payouts, the data showed. Simply put, for each dollar raised in these IPOs taken together, more than $59 went out. And the trend is continuing: the planned $1bn IPO of Walmart’s Indian payments arm and Modern Times Group’s $335mn IPO of its local gaming unit will both take the OFS route. This week, Coca-Cola said the planned listing of its Indian bottler will have the American firm sell a portion of its stake. Banking sources said Carlsberg’s planned Indian IPO will also have no new funds raised — it will also be an OFS. The trend, which bankers and economists say is a result of sky-high stock valuations in India in recent years, shows that the prospect of a lucrative partial exit from Indian investments has become more attractive to many foreign companies than raising new funds to expand. Global companies are pursuing “India listings as this provides them liquidity as well as a positive impact on the market cap for their parent,” said Prashant Gupta, a partner at law firm Shardul Amarchand, which advised both Hyundai and LG on their OFS-structured IPOs. Modern Times declined to comment, while Carlsberg said it is “exploring different options for increasing shareholder value which may potentially include an” Indian IPO. Walmart’s Indian unit, PhonePe, Hyundai, LG and other companies did not respond to Reuters requests for comment. The OFS trend comes at a troubling time for the Indian rupee, which has fallen 13% against the US dollar since 2024 and 6% so far this year. That has raised concerns that the IPO-linked repatriations are compounding already heavy foreign capital outflows. In January, MUFG Bank wrote that its analysis “shows one important contributor to Indian rupee weakness has been the strong IPO market in India.” So far this year, foreign portfolio investors have sold more than $23bn of their holdings, surpassing 2025’s record outflows of $18.9bn. IPO-linked capital outflows are “exerting a steady, though not abrupt, depreciation bias on the rupee,” said Tanay Dalal, a senior vice president of business and economics research at Axis Bank. Government officials and regulators have not indicated that they would try to curb the OFS trend, though India’s Chief Economic Advisor V Anantha Nageswaran warned in November that IPOs had “increasingly become exit vehicles for early investors rather than mechanisms for raising long-term capital.” “This undermines the spirit of public markets,” he said. He did not respond to Reuters queries. India was the world’s second-largest IPO market in 2025 after the US, with 367 listings raising $21.8bn, according to LSEG data. Its markets surged to record highs over the last two years before starting to struggle this year due to uncertainties related to the US-Israeli war on Iran. Still, a record $26bn worth of IPOs are awaiting approvals, according to regulatory data. The appeal for using the OFS route is rooted in valuations. Indian-listed units of foreign firms have consistently traded at multiples that dwarf their parents. Add to that a growing group of domestic investors that has resulted in high valuations in India over the past two years, making local listings attractive, lawyers and bankers said. At least six foreign companies that listed their Indian units in recent years trade at a significant premium to their overseas parents, according to LSEG data. Nestle India, which listed in 1969, has a price-to-earnings ratio — a measure of stock valuations relative to profit — of nearly 77 times, versus 22 times for Swiss parent Nestle . LG Electronics India, which listed last year, trades at nearly 59 times versus 44 times for its South Korean parent, LG Electronics.
admin
Some words, regardless of their source, can do for us what whole libraries can’t. Sounds exaggerated, but permit me to share a couple of pages from my ill-kept notebook and not diary. I never had
admin
As the European Union unveiled its technology sovereignty package on Wednesday, a top official posted in glee: "Today is Tech Liberation Day." True technological independence from US Big Tech, however, will take longer to attain.
admin
On May 29, the assassinated president’s 109th birthday, a Washington judge ordered the removal of Donald Trump’s name on the John F. Kennedy Memorial Centre for the Performing Arts. An appointee of former President Barack
admin
Superheroes, sci-fi adventures and post-apocalyptic dramas are set to dominate cinema screens this summer. This week we take a look at a packed schedule of big-budget releases featuring some of Hollywood’s biggest stars and most
admin
Karishma Vaswani, Tribune News ServiceThe US would have you believe it is showing leadership in Asia. Yet the nation displaying real resolve is Japan. Standing up to China over its rapidly expanding military strength is
admin
Each time I hop into a local store to check out the latest fashion trends I gaze around to check what best suits my style. There was a time when shopping was more than a
