At a time when India's steel industry is slowly rising prices, its counterparts in the US are struggling to do the same as the production costs have gone up. But, the US steel industry is very skeptical about the prices rise as the demand for steel is yet to pick up properly in the country. Even as India and China are witnessing a major surge in demand for steel, the US industry is still slowly picking up pace.
Nickel prices largely depend on global steel demand, which is low in the west and up in China and India now. So, the fall in demand from auto makers in the west and a huge rise in China have complicated the nickel prices. Some 65% of nickel goes into making stainless steel.
The Australian Dollar opens near a three-and-a-half week low today at 0.8925.
Stocks rose on Wednesday after the U.S. Federal Reserve said it will keep interest rates near zero and ahead of President Barack Obama's State of the Union address tonight.
Stocks rose on Wednesday after the U.S. Federal Reserve said it will keep interest rates near zero and ahead of President Barack Obama's State of the Union address tonight.
Caterpillar Inc , the world's largest maker of construction and mining equipment, offered an unexpectedly guarded view of the coming year on Wednesday, sending its stock down more than 8 percent and pulling the broad market down along with it.
Bank of America has dropped plans to exit Merrill Lynch's Asia property funds business and will instead help it raise new money, cashing in on a recovery in the real estate sector, sources said.
Micro-blogging site Twitter is developing technology that will prevent government censorship after Iran and China moved to censor its users.
Global business leaders warned Western governments Wednesday that a populist crackdown on the financial industry could crimp a fragile recovery from the worst recession since the 1930s.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will press China's foreign minister on the issue of Internet freedom, a growing irritant in ties between the two powers, a senior U.S. official said on Wednesday.
Goldman Sachs denied a media report it had been mooting the sale of equity in National Bank of Greece to Chinese banks as debt-ridden Greece struggles to fix its public finances.
North and South Korea exchanged artillery fire near their disputed sea border on Wednesday, highlighting instability along a heavily armed frontier for the second time in three months.
China sought to head off concerns about curbs on Google phone technology on Wednesday, as U.S. business groups urged Washington to tackle alarming measures against foreign high-tech companies in China.
Caterpillar Inc , the world's largest maker of construction and mining equipment, posted stronger-than-expected quarterly earnings on Wednesday and said it was seeing encouraging signs that economies around the world were rebounding.
A Google knock-off has surfaced in China to compete with the world's largest search engine, while at the same time pleading with it to stay in the country despite censorship and hacking allegations.
Global stock markets fell again on Wednesday, hitting their lowest in two months as investors fretted about a monetary squeeze from central banks around the world and also the impact of tightening U.S. banking regulation.
Asian stocks fell for the ninth straight day on Wednesday on fears that China's heightened efforts to rein in soaring credit growth could hamper the global economic recovery.
(Corrects in first line and in text that Asia stocks ex-Japan fell for the 9th straight day, not the 8th)
South Korea's LG Electronics Inc posted a higher-than-expected quarterly operating profit and forecast sales and profits would improve in the first quarter as a global recovery prompts consumers to spend more on electronics.
The Australian Dollar opens lower on Wednesday at 0.8990.
The International Monetary Fund sharply raised its global economic growth forecast, casting developing countries in a leading role while rich nations struggle with high unemployment and government debt.
China's most popular search engine Baidu has been cleared of piracy in a dispute with the music industry, the IFPI trade body for the music sector said on Tuesday.