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By Adedapo Adesanya Brent crude closed below $75 per barrel on Wednesday, precisely selling at $74.39 per barrel after shedding $2.81 or 3.5 per cent. It was the lowest level for the crude oil grade since June, as a larger-than-expected rise in US fuel inventories added to worries about fuel demand, also pressuring the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures by $2.74  or 3.8 per cent in the midweek session to $69.58 a barrel. The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported a crude oil inventory draw of 4.6 million barrels for the week to December 1. A sizeable inventory build

By Dipo Olowookere Trading activities on the floor of the Nigerian Exchange (NGX) Limited further ended on a positive note on Wednesday despite investors diversifying their funds to other securities available in the capital market. Yesterday, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) sold treasury bills to investors in the primary market but this did not affect the stock market, which closed higher by 0.78 per cent amid sustained buying pressure. The growth recorded in the midweek session was mainly driven by bargain-hunting in the banking space, which rose by 5.01 per cent at the close of transactions. It was the

By Adedapo Adesanya  The Nigerian Naira weakened by 17.9 per cent or N144.49 against the American Dollar in the Nigerian Autonomous Foreign Exchange Market (NAFEM) on Wednesday, December 6 as confidence waned in the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) ability to boost the market with enough foreign exchange (FX). Yesterday, the exchange rate of the Naira to the Dollar closed at N951.22/$1 in the official market compared with the preceding session’s rate of N806.73/$1. This happened as the forex turnover slightly went down by 4.9 per cent or $7.05 million to $135.58 million from the $142.63 million reported in the

By Modupe Gbadeyanka Chair of the judging panel of the 2016 Etisalat Prize for Literature, Helon Habila, has announced the 2016 longlist of nine books. The longlist is made up of entries from first-time authors whose books were published in the past 24 months. The longlisted books are Mr and Mrs Doctor by Julie Iromuanya (Coffee House Press, USA), The Yearning by Mohale Mashigo (PanMacmillan, South Africa), Piggy Boy’s Blues by Nakhane Toure (Blackbird Books imprint of Jacana Media, SA), The Peculiars by Jen Thorpe (Penguin Random House, USA) and Born on a Tuesday by Elnathan John (Cassava Republic, Nigeria).

By Modupe Gbadeyanka Since launching its integration on the Lightning Network in September 2021, notable global peer-to-peer (P2P) fintech platform, Paxful, has continued to witness a surge in deposit volume. In April 2022, the platform recorded a 54 per cent surge in deposit volume as users take advantage of the cheaper rates the company offers when compared with its competitors. In Nigeria, the volume of money being sent out on Lightning has doubled from October 2021 to May 2022. One telling insight is that Paxful’s median Lightning send-out for 2022 is less than $30–which is less than its median Bitcoin

By Dipo Olowookere The Divisional Head of Trading Business at the Nigerian Exchange (NGX) Limited, Mr Jude Chiemeka, has disclosed that the need for alternative sources of income other than salaries or profits from businesses became more important to individuals by the COVID-19 pandemic. He said this on Tuesday, November 16, 2021, at the retail investor webinar organised by the exchange themed Creating an Investment Portfolio That Works in a Post-COVID Era. Mr Chiemeka stated that this was one of the reasons the exchange came up with the webinar to educate investors, especially those in the retail end. “The advent

By Adedapo Adesanya The Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) has sued President Muhammadu Buhari over the failure to review and rescind his reported approval for security agencies to access people’s personal details via NIN-SIM linkage without due process of law. In a statement issued by SERAP’s Deputy Director, Mr Kolawole Oluwadare, on Sunday, the organisation accused the President of giving approval to the security agencies without due process. It asked the court for an order to set aside the unlawful data access, saying it amounts to a violation of the citizens’ rights just as it requested for “an order

By Modupe Gbadeyanka For the second time, the federal government is considering reducing the benchmark for crude oil in the 2020 budget. Some weeks ago, Nigeria slashed the crude oil benchmark to $30 per barrel from the initial $57 per barrel as a result of crash in the global price of the commodity. At the downward review of the spendings for this fiscal year done in March, government announced that the N10.59 trillion 2020 budget would be cut by 15 percent. The country relies heavily on the sales of crude oil sales for foreign earnings and since the global health

By Adedapo Adesanya The value of Bitcoin (BTC) appreciated further by 5.4 per cent as it was sold at the rate of N6,325,885 at the cryptocurrency market on Tuesday, October 27. Business Post gathered from data sourced from Quidax, a platform used for trading cryptocurrencies in Naira in Nigeria, that other digital currencies equally gained at the market yesterday. The Ethereum (ETH) was sold for N187,998 after going up by 1.9 per cent, Ripple (RPX) equally went up to N116.98 as a result of the 2.3 per cent growth it recorded while Dash (DASH) rose by 2.7 per cent to

By Dipo Olowookere The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has revealed that the manufacturing sector in Nigeria continued its faster growth rate in the month of May 2019. The performance of the critical sector of the economy was measured by the apex bank via the Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI), which stood at 57.8 index points in the month under consideration, indicating expansion for the 26th consecutive month. According to the CBN, the index grew at a faster rate when compared to the index in the previous month. Business Post learned that 13 of the 14 subsectors surveyed reported growth in

By Adedapo Adesanya The Brent took a worse turn as uncertainty remained about the expected sanction on Russian energy, losing 0.5 per cent or 49 cents to trade at $100.58 as the United States West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude rose by 0.6 per cent or 63 cents to sell at $96.03 per barrel. European Union envoys are set to approve a ban on Russian coal that would take full effect from mid-August, a month later than initially planned, following pressure from Germany to delay the measure. The phase-out of EU imports of Russian oil is the cornerstone measure in the