Country Financial News

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. A couple of years ago, I wrote about how India remains, at its core, a fixed-income country. I pointed out that even the Public Provident Fund (PPF)—arguably the best fixed-income option available—delivered only about ₹60 lakh over 44 years of systematic investing.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. “No one was paying any attention to Venezuelan oil two weeks ago," a longtime oilman said to me the other day, “but now everyone is." Donald Trump made that happen. Following the dramatic seizure of dictator Nicolás Maduro by American forces on Jan.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. New Delhi: India’s top electric bus manufacturers are gearing up for the government’s next mega tender of 6,230 electric buses, cumulatively valued at over ₹6,000 crore, to be deployed across five cities—Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad and Hyderabad—according to tender documents released on 9 January. Delhi, grappling with severe air pollution, will get the largest allocation of 3,330 electric buses through this round of procurement, the tender document, reviewed by Mint, showed.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The New Year started with a bang. Three days into 2026 came the extraordinary news that the US had captured Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Good morning. Trump moves fast. Less than one week after the U.S.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. From India’s economic activity estimated to remain strong in 2025-26, to India's oil companies expected to benefit from the US invasion of Venezuela, services activity losing momentum in December, Niti Aayog expressing worry over India’s high trade deficit with several countries despite trade deals, and rising prices of copper—here’s this week’s news in numbers.Growth dynamicsThe government pegged GDP growth at 7.4% in 2025-26 despite the ongoing uncertainty related to high US tariffs. The first advance estimate released on Wednesday put GDP growth marginally higher than the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI’s) projection of 7.3%.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. New Delhi: A deluge of solar power and rules binding electricity distributors to purchase it are prompting distress sales on India's electricity exchanges, trade data showed. Discoms sitting on excess power often sell it on exchanges at a loss, as the alternative would be to receive nothing, given the weak demand during solar hours.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. MUMBAI: Domestic equities were shaken by the ‘Trump factor’ throughout the week, leaving India the worst-performing major market globally as risk-off sentiment gripped investors. Markets struggled amid a trio of US-driven shocks.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said Friday the Islamic Republic won’t back down in the face of fast-growing protests and threats from President Trump to intervene. New protests have been called for Friday, a day after the largest demonstrations in years swept through Tehran.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. MiniMax made a stellar stock-market debut in Hong Kong on Friday, with shares more than doubling as investors continued to pile into Chinese artificial-intelligence start-ups. The stock soared 109% to 345 Hong Kong dollars on its first day of trading, following an initial public offering in which MiniMax raised HK$4.8 billion ($619 million) at an offer price of HK$165.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. If trade deficits are a national emergency, they are an emergency of a peculiar sort. America began to run them consistently in the mid-1970s.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. America’s enchantment with Venezuelan oil is a century-long tale of fortunes made and lost, starting with a 1922 letter to President Warren Harding’s secretary of state and culminating with President Trump’s move to wrest control of the country’s oil wealth. U.S.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Oil isn’t the only commodity to drive President Donald Trump’s decision to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The nation’s critical minerals shouldn’t be overlooked as a potential motive for regime change.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. WASHINGTON—A smooth-faced 41-year-old Donald Trump settled in before a live studio audience assembled for The Oprah Winfrey Show and held forth on how America should be getting a cut of Kuwaiti oil. “Kuwait is not paying us for all the oil they’re sending out," said Trump, wearing a familiar solid red tie, as Oprah pressed him on his foreign policy views during the April 1988 interview.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. President Donald Trump has pulled the US out of more than five dozen global organizations.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. On Wednesday, the same day that the National Statistics Office published its first advance estimate of GDP for 2025-26, the government announced that India’s long-overdue census will kick off on 1 April 2026. The coincidence is apt, even if unintended.

Mint explains why oil prices have remained range-bound and what it means for India.Oil prices are back to where they were before the US action in Venezuela. On 3 January, US forces attacked the Venezuelan capital Caracas and captured President Mudaro. When the markets opened on 5 January, the benchmark Brent Crude saw a marginal spike to $62.56 a barrel.

₹183.75 apiece on the BSE on Wednesday.Tata Steel, through its Canadian subsidiary, owns iron ore assets in the Labrador and Northern Quebec regions of the country. In FY225, Tata Steel had an iron ore production of 40.5 million tonnes in India, and 3 million tonnes in Canada.

There’s more to dense fog conditions than pollution and flight cancellations. There’s also the risk of power outages.In fact, a perfect storm may be brewing across several parts of north and central India, where a rain-deficient winter, dense fog conditions and atmospheric pollution have raised concerns over the tripping of power transmission lines, said three people aware of the outage concerns in India’s power system.Fog increases moisture on power transmission lines, allowing pollutants in the air to settle on their surface.

flat steel products at 12% for the first year, 11.5% for the second and 11% for the third year. India had notified an interim order imposing the duty in April to halt the surge in imports, which had lapsed on 7 November.Benchmark HRC prices had fallen to ₹47,100 per tonne in November, a 10-month low, while rebar prices stood at ₹47,000 per tonne, a five-year low due to low demand and oversupply.Hot rolled coil is used in automobiles and home appliances, while rebars are used in construction and infrastructure.Tata Steel, JSW Steel, Jindal Steel, AMNS India and Steel Authority of India did not respond to Mint’s queries on price hikes.According to Niladri N Bhattacharjee, Partner and Metals and Mining Industry Leader at Grant Thornton Bharat, the December safeguard duty, coupled with a weaker rupee, has raised the cost of steel imports from countries such as China and Japan, giving domestic producers confidence to raise prices.“Supported by strong domestic demand, these factors have allowed steelmakers to push through price hikes.

India’s metal sector is becoming increasingly important as the country sharpens its focuses on infrastructure, power, manufacturing, and clean energy. Metals such as zinc and copper are essential inputs across construction, electrification, renewables, and industrial production.Hindustan Zinc and Hindustan Copper stand out among the top metal stocks in India, though their businesses operate on very different scales and cycles.Today we compare these two metal stocks by examining their operations, financial performance, and risks to help your understand how each fits into India’s metal ecosystem.Hindustan Zinc, a subsidiary of the Vedanta Group, is the world’s largest integrated producer of zinc and also ranks among the top five silver producers globally.Over the years, the company has built a large-scale and cost-efficient mining and smelting ecosystem in India.