Pakistani currency on Monday hit a four-month high at Rs279.20 against the US dollar in the inter-bank market as it resumed the uptrend on the back of increase in supply of foreign currency compared to its demand for imports. Market talk suggests that dollar inflows surged on account of rise in remittances sent home by overseas Pakistanis and higher export earnings. Exporters scrambled to sell
KARACHI: Pakistan’s commercial banks have continued to freely lend to the cash-strapped government at elevated rates of return, taking their financing to a record high of 93% of total deposits in January 2024. According to data compiled and shared by Optimus Capital Management (OCM), banks’ credit to the private sector, however, remained stagnant at the eight-month low at 44% of deposits in Jan
What did not appear so pronounced in politics has surfaced in the recent split electorate mandate: people’s urge for self-governance. An analyst says that the public has reclaimed the grounds that rightly belong to them by defying the chronic status quo and the culture of dread. In the economic field, as evidenced by the mobility of labour, an increasing number of people are improving their liv
The future of the long-stalled Gwadar power plant remains uncertain as it appears to have reached yet another impasse a year after the previous Shehbaz Sharif administration had given the go-ahead to execute the project on imported coal as originally planned. The 300-megawatt power project has failed to make any headway despite it being listed as a “fast track project” under the multi-billion d
Trade ministers from around the world gathered in Abu Dhabi on Monday for a World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting that aims to set new global commerce rules, but its ambitious chief Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and delegates sought to curb expectations. The almost 30-year-old global watchdog, whose rules underpin 75 per cent of global commerce, tries to strike deals by consensus, but such efforts are b