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(Reuters) – Brookfield Asset Management Inc said on Thursday it will separate and list 25% of the stake in its asset management unit, months after the Toronto-based company said it was considering the move to open up growth options.

The company will initially hold a 75% stake in the new entity, with the rest distributed to its current shareholders by the year end, Brookfield said.

Both the parent company and the separated unit will trade on the New York Stock Exchange and the Toronto Stock Exchange, the company said.

In February, Brookfield Asset Management Chief Executive Officer Bruce Flatt wrote in a letter to shareholders the company was “asset-heavy” compared to most of its peers, and that dimmed its appeal to some.

The split could also potentially attract interest from investors who do not want exposure to Brookfield’s other units, such as the reinsurance business launched last year, Flatt wrote at the time.

Last year, Wells Fargo & Co also streamlined operations by selling its asset management arm to private equity firms GTCR LLC and Reverence Capital Partners for $2.1 billion.

(Reporting by Niket Nishant in Bengaluru; Editing by Krishna Chandra Eluri and Shinjini Ganguli)

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By Ann Saphir

(Reuters) -The Dallas Federal Reserve on Wednesday named Lorie Logan as its next president, filling the vacancy left by Robert Kaplan’s departure last fall after an outcry over the ethics of his active stocks trading during the coronavirus pandemic.

Logan, an executive vice president at the New York Fed and the manager of the Fed’s System Open Market Account, will start her new job on Aug. 22, the Dallas Fed said in a statement.

The U.S. central bank is in the midst of its most rapid policy tightening in decades to deal with inflation that is rising at its fastest pace since the early 1980s. Data released on Wednesday showed consumer prices rose at an annual pace of 8.3% in April.

Logan, 49, will join the presidents of the 11 other regional Fed banks and the Washington-based Fed Board of Governors in setting monetary policy for the world’s biggest economy. Her first policy meeting will be on Sept. 20-21.

She will be the Dallas Fed’s first permanent female chief.

A senior official in the New York Fed’s markets division since 2012, Logan currently manages the central bank’s $9 trillion portfolio of securities, cash and other assets.

Those holdings roughly doubled during the pandemic as the Fed sought to ease financial conditions and bolster the economy, and under Logan the Fed is now poised to trim those assets, beginning next month, as part of its overall bid to raise U.S. borrowing costs and slow growth.

“Lorie is a trusted colleague and dedicated public servant whose remarkable skill and experience with complex financial markets has informed our decisions and helped implement monetary policy to support the U.S. economy,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said in the statement.

Powell has signaled that he and fellow policymakers will likely follow last week’s half-percentage-point interest rate hike with at least two more hikes of the same size at upcoming policy meetings.

The aim of the rises in borrowing costs is to slow household demand for goods and services and business demand for workers fast enough to cool price and wage pressures and bring inflation down to the Fed’s 2% target.

Fed policymakers hope that can be done without undercutting the strong labor market or sending the economy into a prolonged downturn.

As a Fed insider and a markets expert, Logan is a departure from the Dallas Fed’s last two presidents, both of whom came from outside the U.S. central bank’s system.

Meredith Black has run the Dallas Fed on an interim basis since October after Kaplan, along with Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren, retired before their terms were out. They stepped down amid revelations of personal trading even as the Fed was buying trillions of dollars of assets to stabilize markets, lifting the prices of the kinds of securities that both men were trading.

Four other Fed banks also have women leaders, including incoming Boston Fed President Susan Collins, currently provost of the University of Michigan. She will be the first Black woman to serve as a Fed bank chief when she starts on July 1.

U.S. Senator Bob Menendez and fellow lawmaker Raul Ruiz, a U.S. representative, said they were disappointed the Dallas Fed board did not pick what could have been the Fed’s first Latino policymaker.

“It missed an opportunity,” they wrote.

(Reporting by Ann Saphir in Berkeley, Calif.Editing by Paul Simao and Matthew Lewis)

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HANOI (Reuters) – The chairman of Vietnam’s Vingroup conglomerate said on Wednesday that an initial public offering (IPO) for the company’s auto unit, VinFast, may be delayed until next year due to market uncertainty.

The IPO is currently slated for the fourth quarter of this year. Vingroup Chairman Pham Nhat Vuong also told the company’s annual general meeting the conglomerate was prioritising spending on VinFast and gave an aggressive car sales target.

“We are eyeing a Q4 IPO, but there are lots of ongoing market uncertainties now… If necessary we may delay it to next year,” Vuong said.

“The IPO is not just for fundraising. It’s also about marketing and claiming VinFast’s position globally,” he said.

VinFast’s Singapore-based holding company had filed for an IPO with the U.S. securities regulators, as the company readies a $4-billion investment to build a factory in the United States.

Vuong also told the meeting the car maker was facing obstacles obtaining parts from China.

“Chip factories in Shanghai are closed – therefore chip supplies have been disrupted and the same story for other parts,” Vuong said, referring to supply chain disruptions caused by COVID-19 lockdowns in China’s business hub.

But Vuong sought to reassure shareholders the startup would go ahead with the IPO “no matter how uncertain the market”.

VinFast, which began operations in 2019, is betting big on the U.S. market, where it hopes to compete with legacy automakers and startups with two all-electric SUVs and a battery leasing model that will reduce the purchase price.

VinFast has promised to create 7,500 jobs at its planned plant in North Carolina, where it will build the battery-powered VF8 and VF9 SUVs. The company has said it plans to begin construction of the plant as soon as permits are granted with a goal of starting production by 2024.

It has previously said it plans to begin exporting the two electric vehicles to the United States later this year from its existing plant in Vietnam.

Vuong said on Wednesday VinFast aimed to sell 750,000 cars in 2026, with 150,000 cars to be produced in North Carolina and the rest from its Vietnam factory.

Vingroup is also looking at getting financing from the U.S. government to support its expansion, including potentially tapping lending from the U.S. government’s $25 billion Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing loan programme.

(Reporting by Phoung Nguyen; Writing by Ed Davies; Editing by Kanupriya Kapoor)

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TOKYO (Reuters) – Toyota Motor Corp on Wednesday reported a 33% fall in quarterly profit, as a sliding yen and solid demand failed to offset the impact of production disruptions caused by a global shortage of chips and China’s COVID restrictions.

The world’s biggest automaker by sales posted an operating profit of 463.8 billion yen ($3.56 billion) in the January-March quarter, well below an average estimate of 521.1 billion yen from seven analysts surveyed by Refinitiv.

It compares with a 689.8 billion yen profit in the same period a year earlier.

($1 = 130.4100 yen)

(Reporting by Satoshi Sugiyama; Editing by Kenneth Maxwell)

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(Reuters) -Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd forecast operating cash flow to be positive for the current quarter on Tuesday, as the U.S. cruise operator benefits from higher on-board spending and prices with its full fleet back in service.

Shares of the company rose about 3% in early trade, as the company also said that booking trends remained strong despite a hit from Omicron variant of the coronavirus and the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

“We are seeing an explosive showing by consumers, particularly American consumers. Consumer spend is strong, snapping back and even exceeding where we left off in 2019,” Chief Executive Officer Frank Del Rio said on a post-earnings call.

Norwegian Cruise, which saw about 60 cancellations or modifications to sailing due to the Russia-Ukraine war, said its booking momentum was temporarily disrupted due to the crisis, but added that the impact was “short-lived.” It has also decided to remove all sailings to ports in Russia from its itineraries in 2023.

Over the past two years, cruise operators have been burning through their cash piles, as the pandemic brought the industry to a standstill. The company reported negative operating cash flow in the last few quarters, which turned slightly positive only in March.

Norwegian, which completed its phased restart of operations earlier this week with all of its ships returning to sail, said higher ticket prices and onboard revenue also helped the company see improved cash flow in the first quarter ended March 31.

However, the company still expects to post a net loss in the current quarter, as it accounted for higher costs including fuel expenses. Norwegian reported a fuel expense of $135.5 million for the first quarter.

The cruise operator also posted a bigger-than-expected loss of $1.82 per share for the reported quarter.

(Reporting by Ananya Mariam Rajesh in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli and Rashmi Aich)

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By Medha Singh

(Reuters) – Crypto assets bled nearly $800 billion in market value over the past month, touching a low of $1.4 trillion on Tuesday, according to data site CoinMarketCap, as the end of easy monetary policy diminishes appetite for risk assets.

Bitcoin, which makes up for nearly 40% of the crypto market, hit a 10-month low earlier on Tuesday, before rebounding to $31,450, just six days after touching $40,000. It was more than 54% below its Nov. 10 all-time high of $69,000.

Digital asset prices have slumped, mirroring a plunge in equities on fears of aggressive interest rate hikes across the globe to stave off decades-high inflation. The tech-heavy Nasdaq was down 28% from its November 2021 record high.

Total crypto market value was at $2.2 trillion on April 2, well off of its all-time peak of $2.9 trillion in early November, as per CoinMarketCap.

“Bitcoin remains highly correlated to the broader economic conditions, which suggest the road ahead may unfortunately be a rocky one, at least for the time being,” blockchain data provider Glassnode said in a note.

Signs of weakness in stablecoins, typically a safer crypto currency, further spooked investors. TerraUSD, the world’s fourth-largest stablecoin, lost a third of its value on Tuesday as it lost its peg to the dollar.

Despite bitcoin’s price slump, funds and products linked to it posted inflows of $45 million last week as investors took advantage of price weakness, according to digital asset manager Coinshares in a report released on Monday.

“Enormous amount of liquidity that has inflated some of these cryptocurrencies,” said Sebastien Galy, senior macro strategist at Nordea Asset Management. He expects crypto, also correlated to high-growth stocks, to come under pressure as several central banks tighten their monetary policy.

(Reporting by Medha Singh and Sruthi Shankar in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli)

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The world is creeping closer to the warming threshold international agreements are trying to prevent, with nearly a 50-50 chance that Earth will temporarily hit that temperature mark within the next five years, teams of meteorologists across the globe predicted.

With human-made climate change continuing, there’s a 48% chance that the globe will reach a yearly average of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels of the late 1800s at least once between now and 2026, a bright red signal in climate change negotiations and science, a team of 11 different forecast centers predicted for the World Meteorological Organization late Monday.

The odds are inching up along with the thermometer. Last year, the same forecasters put the odds at closer to 40% and a decade ago it was only 10%.

The team, coordinated by the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office, in their five-year general outlook said there is a 93% chance that the world will set a record for hottest year by the end of 2026. They also said there’s a 93% chance that the five years from 2022 to 2026 will be the hottest on record. Forecasters also predict the devastating fire-prone megadrought in the U.S. Southwest will keep going.

“We’re going to see continued warming in line with what is expected with climate change,” said UK Met Office senior scientist Leon Hermanson, who coordinated the report.

These forecasts are big picture global and regional climate predictions on a yearly and seasonal time scale based on long term averages and state of the art computer simulations. They are different than increasingly accurate weather forecasts that predict how hot or wet a certain day will be in specific places.

But even if the world hits that mark of 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial times — the globe has already warmed about 1.1 degrees (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 1800s — that’s not quite the same as the global threshold first set by international negotiators in the 2015 Paris agreement. In 2018, a major United Nations science report predicted dramatic and dangerous effects on people and the world if warming exceeds 1.5 degrees.

The global 1.5 degree threshold is about the world being that warm not for one year, but over a 20- or 30- year time period, several scientists said. This is not what the report predicts. Meteorologists can only tell if Earth hits that average mark years, maybe a decade or two, after it is actually reached there because it is a long term average, Hermanson said.

“This is a warning of what will be just average in a few years,” said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, who wasn’t part of the forecast teams.

The prediction makes sense given how warm the world already is and an additional tenth of a degree Celsius (nearly two-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit) is expected because of human-caused climate change in the next five years, said climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of the tech company Stripe and Berkeley Earth, who wasn’t part of the forecast teams. Add to that the likelihood of a strong El Nino — the natural periodic warming of parts of the Pacific that alter world weather — which could toss another couple tenths of a degree on top temporarily and the world gets to 1.5 degrees.

The world is in the second straight year of a La Nina, the opposite of El Nino, which has a slight global cooling effect but isn’t enough to counter the overall warming of heat-trapping gases spewed by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, scientists said. The five-year forecast says that La Nina is likely to end late this year or in 2023.

The greenhouse effect from fossil fuels is like putting global temperatures on a rising escalator. El Nino, La Nina and a handful of other natural weather variations are like taking steps up or down on that escalator, scientists said.

On a regional scale, the Arctic will still be warming during the winter at rate three times more than the globe on average. While the American Southwest and southwestern Europe are likely to be drier than normal the next five years, wetter than normal conditions are expected for Africa’s often arid Sahel region, northern Europe, northeast Brazil and Australia, the report predicted.

The global team has been making these predictions informally for a decade and formally for about five years, with greater than 90% accuracy, Hermanson said.

NASA top climate scientist Gavin Schmidt said the figures in this report are “a little warmer” than what the U.S. NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration use. He also had doubts about skill level on long-term regional predictions.

“Regardless of what is predicted here, we are very likely to exceed 1.5 degrees C in the next decade or so, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that we are committed to this in the long term — or that working to reduce further change is not worthwhile,” Schmidt said in an email.

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Follow AP’s climate coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate

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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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By Tommy Wilkes

LONDON (Reuters) – Stocks fell heavily again on Monday and the dollar rocketed to a new two-decade high as worries about higher interest rates and a tightened lockdown in Shanghai deepened investors’ fears that the global economy is rapidly heading for a slowdown.

After a bruising session on Friday in which U.S. stocks sold off sharply as another rise in long-dated U.S. Treasury yields unnerved investors, markets were set for a rocky start to the week, with most indexes in the red.

Central banks in the United States, Britain and Australia all raised interest rates last week, and investors are bracing for more tightening as policymakers try to get on top of soaring inflation.

“We see recession risk over the next 12 to 18 months to be as high as about 30%,” said Dan Ivascyn, group chief investment officer at bond giant PIMCO.

“One of the key reasons for that is the Fed and other central banks appear dead set on getting inflation under control.”

There was plenty more for investors to worry about on Monday aside from tightening financial conditions.

There appeared to be no let-up in China’s zero-COVID policy, with Shanghai tightening the city-wide lockdown for 25 million residents.

Speculation that Russian President Vladimir Putin might declare war on Ukraine in order to call up reserves during his speech at “Victory Day” celebrations also hurt market sentiment. Putin has so far characterised Russia’s actions in Ukraine as a “special military operation”, not a war.

Wall Street futures headed sharply lower with the S&P 500 futures down 2% and Nasdaq futures 2.5%. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq on Friday posted their fifth straight week of declines — their longest losing streak in a decade.

The Euro STOXX weakened 2%. Germany’s DAX lost 1.6% and Britain’s FTSE 100 1.78%.

MSCI’s main emerging market stocks index fell 1.2% to its lowest level since July 2020.

The MSCI World Index dropped 0.7%, leaving it not far from the 17-month intraday low reached on Friday.

(Graphic- World equities: https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/mkt/znvnemgrrpl/world%20equities.JPG)

MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan fell 1.4% and Japan’s Nikkei 2.53%. Chinese blue chips eased 0.8%, while in offshore markets the yuan fell to as low as 6.7759 per dollar, its weakest since October 2020.

The big data event of the week is the U.S. consumer price report due on Wednesday, when only a slight easing in inflation is forecast, and certainly nothing to prevent the Federal Reserve from hiking by at least 50 basis points in June.

U.S. 10-year bond yields on Monday reached a new 3-1/2 year high of 3.203%.

DOLLAR DOMINANCE

With investors juggling so many worries, one place they are looking for safety is in the dollar.

The dollar index, which measures the greenback against a basket of currencies, rose as much as 0.4% to 104.19, the latest in a string of 20-year highs.

“Risk appetite is fragile and yield spreads continue to suggest further upside on the Dollar Index,” said Sean Callow, a senior FX strategist at Westpac.

“We look for ongoing demand for DXY (the dollar index) on dips, with 104 already being probed and still potential for a run towards 107 multi-week.”

The soaring dollar is hammering other currencies. The euro briefly dropped back below $1.05 while the Japanese yen fell to its weakest since 2002.

Expectations that the Fed will move more aggressively in raising interest rates are supporting the dollar, as is a sense among investors that the U.S. economy will hold up better than a euro zone hit by the fallout from the war in Ukraine.

But rates are also rising in the euro zone. On Monday, Germany’s 10-year bond yield hit a new highest level since 2014, buoyed by hawkish policymaker Robert Holzmann saying on Saturday that the European Central Bank should raise rates three times this year to combat inflation.

The diary is full of Fed speakers this week, giving them plenty of opportunity to keep up the hawkish chorus.

Oil prices initially see-sawed after the Group of Seven nations committed to banning or phasing out imports of Russian oil over time, before falling.

Brent dropped 2.15% at $109.97 by 1115 GMT, while U.S. crude dropped 2.39% to $107.15. [O/R]

Spot gold prices lost 1.24% to $1,859 an ounce, having struggled recently to gain traction as a safe haven. [GOL/]

(Reporting by Tommy Wilkes; Additional reporting by Wayne Cole in Sydney; Editing by Bradley Perrett and Chizu Nomiyama)

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By Helen Reid and Clara Denina

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – The need to secure new sources of metals for the energy transition amid sanctions on top producer Russia has increased the Africa risk appetite for major miners, who have few alternatives to the resource-rich continent.

Companies and investors are considering projects they may have previously overlooked, while governments are also looking to Africa, anxious to ensure their countries can procure enough metals to feed an accelerating net-zero push.

This year’s Investing in African Mining Indaba conference, which runs May 9-12 in Cape Town, will see the highest-ranking U.S. government official in years attending, organisers say, as well as representatives from the Japan Oil, Gas and Metals Corporation (JOGMEC), in a sign of rich countries’ rising concern about securing supply.

“The reality is that the resources the world wants are typically located in difficult places,” said Steven Fox, executive chairman of New York-based political risk consultancy Veracity Worldwide.

The U.S. administration wants to position itself as a strong supporter of battery metals projects in sub-Saharan Africa, he said.

“While Africa presents its challenges, those challenges are no more difficult than the corresponding set of challenges in Canada. It may be easier to actually bring a project to fruition in Africa, than in a place like Canada or the U.S.,” he added.

The United States has voiced support for new domestic mines, but projects have stalled. Rio Tinto’s Resolution copper project, for example, was halted over Native American claims on the land, and conservation issues.

Certainly, the risks of mining in sub-Saharan Africa remain high. The acute security challenge facing mines in the gold-rich Sahel region was highlighted last month when Russia’s Nordgold abandoned its Taparko gold mine in Burkina Faso over an increasing threat from militants.

And even in the continent’s most industrialised economy, South Africa, deteriorating rail infrastructure is forcing some coal producers to resort to trucking their product to ports.

Yet with Russia’s 7% of global nickel supply, 10% of the world’s platinum, and 25-30% of the world’s palladium off the table, Africa’s rich deposits of those metals start looking a lot more attractive.

“As a mining company, there aren’t many opportunities and if you are going to grow, you’re going to have to look at riskier countries,” said George Cheveley, portfolio manager at Ninety One.

“Clearly, after Russia-Ukraine people are more sensitive to geopolitical risk and you cannot predict which projects are going to work out and which are not,” he added.

Kabanga Nickel, a project in Tanzania, secured funding from global miner BHP in January, and CEO Chris Showalter said it is seeing increased demand from potential offtakers.

Western sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine are forcing metals supply chains to reconfigure along geopolitical lines, Showalter said.

“Not everyone’s going to be able to get clean battery metals from a friendly jurisdiction, so I think some difficult decisions will have to be made, and it is going to force people to make some new decisions about where they want to source.”

(Reporting by Helen Reid in Johannesburg and Clara Denina in London; Editing by Amran Abocar and Susan Fenton)

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(Reuters) – London’s West End focused commercial landlords Capital & Counties Properties Plc and Shaftesbury Plc are in advanced talks about a 3.5 billion pound ($4.32 billion) merger, Sky News reported on Saturday.

The companies are in detailed discussions about an all-share tie-up that could be announced within weeks, the report said.

As of November, Shaftesbury owned about 600 buildings in the heart of London’s West End, which includes Carnaby Street and Chinatown.

In June 2020, Capital & Counties Properties (Capco) bought a 26.3% stake in Shaftesbury from Hong Kong tycoon Samuel Tak Lee for 436 million pounds ($537.85 million).

Shaftesbury and Capco did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

($1 = 0.8106 pounds)

(Reporting by Shivam Patel in Bengaluru; Editing by Kirsten Donovan)

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