This merger represents a significant milestone in the business community, bringing together two like-minded organizations to serve better the needs and interests of Surrey and White Rock businesses. The Surrey & White Rock Board of Trade will leverage both organizations’ strengths, resources, and investments to provide its members with enhanced support, advocacy, and networking opportunities.

“This merger is a test of members’ commitment to the collective vision and dismembers,” said Bill Brooks, Board Chair of the South Surrey & White Rock Chamber of Commerce. Together, we will be a stronger voice for businesses, driving positive change and opportunities for growth.”

“We are thrilled to announce the successful approval of the merger between the South Surrey & White Rock Chamber of Commerce and the Surrey Board of Trade,” said Rory Morgan, Board Chair of the Surrey Board of Trade. “This decision reflects our shared commitment to fostering economic growth, innovation, and prosperity in our communities.”

The Surrey & White Rock Board of Trade will build on the legacy of both organizations while introducing new initiatives and programs to meet the evolving needs of businesses in the region. Members will still enjoy their current benefits and events but have expanded networking opportunities, advocacy efforts, educational resources, and access to a broader network of business leaders and decision-makers.

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“I invite @elonmusk, Punjab Model will create Ludhiana as hub for Electric Vehicles & Battery industry with time bound single window clearance for investment that brings new technology to Punjab, create green jobs, walking path of environment preservation & sustainable development,” Sidhu wrote on Twitter.

Earlier, Telangana and Maharashtra also invited Elon Musk to set up business in their states.

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The financial services provider will take its processes on to Google Cloud servers. The two firms are planning on developing risk mitigation tools and other user-benefitting platforms for people entering the space of “derivatives”, which are financial instruments instead of assets.

Meanwhile, Google Cloud has also acknowledged the new partnership on Twitter.

“Today, we announced a 10-year strategic partnership with @CMEGroup to increase market access, create efficiencies for clients, and build new products and services for the financial services industry.”

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The world’s richest person had previously said he could face a “massive” tax bill this year as he has to exercise a large number of stock options coming due next year.

“Much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10% of my Tesla stock. Do you support this? Yes or No,” he tweeted.

In another tweet he said, “I will abide by the results of this poll, whichever way it goes. Note, I do not take a cash salary or bonus from anywhere. I only have stock, thus the only way for me to pay taxes personally is to sell stock.”

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As per the records, out of total 2.33 lakh applicants, 1.02 lakh females ( about 44%) had applied for the patwari post in the state.

The recruitment process for the post is underway and the Services Selection Board (SSB) had conducted a written test on August 8 and the result is likely to be announced on Wednesday while the recruitment process for the second phase will be held soon.

The state government is conducting this Patwari exam after four years.

The data states the highest number of applications were received from Patiala as  21, 567 people applied for this government post followed by Sangrur 19, 974, Bathinda 18, 126 applications and with 17625applications  Fazilka stood 4th while 12, 336 applications came from Mansa district.

In the Doaba region, the highest 7141 applications were received from the Jalandhar district. Similarly, 2183 people applied from Kapurthala and 2667 from SBS Nagar district for the post.

As per the government records, there were around 200 contenders for each post as against 1152 posts over 2.33 lakh applications were received by the department, indicating a craze for government’s job among Punjabis.

Astonishingly, even the mandatory qualification was the only graduation for this post, applications were M.phil, PhD, postgraduates and other higher qualification students.

From 2.33 applicants, over 1.71 candidates had appeared for written examinations at 550 centres across the state last week. The exam was in multiple-choice questions format and there will be negative marking.

SSB Chairman Raman Behal said that now the department would hold the second test for shortlisted 11,520 candidates.

A senior administration official, on request of anonymity, expounds the craze for this post among youngsters, “Many consider this a lucrative post as the concerned officer has access to revenue records and people pay a hefty amount to make corrections in land records especially in rural areas.”

Meanwhile, if selected, a newly recruited will get Rs 5,000 as a stipend for18-month training and later the person would get Rs 20,000 for the first three years

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MELBOURNE (Reuters) – Spot gold steadied on Tuesday after falling for three days, but looked at risk of further weakness as the dollar edged up on comments by a Federal Reserve official that the next U.S. rate rise could come as soon as next month.

The United States may be in line for an interest rate hike as soon as April, Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhart said on Monday, another sign that policymakers are comfortable allowing U.S. monetary policy to diverge from other major economies.

Prospects for higher interest rates were already helping the dollar revive from five-months lows touched last week. A stronger dollar makes gold more expensive for investors paying with other currencies.

“There’s a little bit of fatigue in there as well with the strong rally we’ve seen in the past few weeks, so it feels like a bit of profit taking going on sparked by the Fed comments,” said strategist Daniel Hynes of ANZ in Sydney.

Spot gold was trading up 0.1 percent at $1,244.90 an ounce by 0138 GMT. Prices hit the weakest in three sessions at $1,240.30 an ounce on Monday.

U.S. gold was up 0.1 percent at $1,244.80 an ounce.

U.S. home resales fell sharply in February in a potentially troubling sign for America’s economy, which has otherwise looked resilient to the global economic slowdown.

Mali has upgraded its estimated below-ground gold reserves by a third to 800 tonnes, enough to maintain current levels of output for the next 15 years, said the West African nation’s mines minister.

Asian stocks wobbled on Tuesday as the hawkish comments from Fed officials stoked uncertainty about policymakers’ intentions less than a week after Fed Chair Janet Yellen had set out a more cautious path to rate increases this year.

China imported 180,131 kilograms of silver in February, down by 7.4 percent from the same month a year ago, after a jump in imports in January. For the first two months of the year, China’s silver imports jumped 24 percent to 509,085 kgs from a year earlier.

Palladium imports tripled in February to 3,157 kgs, while platinum imports rose by 27 percent to 3,622 kgs.

Platinum at $974.74 an ounce was down half a percent while palladium held 0.3 percent firmer at $598.50.

Silver had edged down by 0.1 percent at $15.811 an ounce.

(Reporting by Melanie Burton; Editing by Joseph Radford and Richard Pullin)

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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – The Federal Reserve won’t raise interest rates this week, but will likely make clear that as long as U.S. inflation and jobs continue to strengthen, economic weakness overseas won’t stop rates from rising fairly soon.

That will be a big change from the last time the Fed met, when uncertainty over the impact of slower growth in China and Europe drove policymakers to signal it would stay on hold until it could make a better call on the outlook.

That in turn was a setback from just a month earlier, when the Fed raised rates for the first time in nearly a decade and seemed ready to move four more times this year.

This week, fresh forecasts from the Fed’s 17 officials released after the meeting will almost certainly signal a retreat from that pace, to perhaps two or three rate hikes this year, economists predict and Fed officials themselves have suggested.

But the expected downgrade may largely reflect the drag from the oil and stock market slide in January and the Fed’s decision then to put policy on hold, rather than mounting worries over the U.S. or global outlook.

Indeed, since the last Fed meeting U.S. inflation has shown signs of stabilizing, with one measure published by the Dallas Fed rising to 1.9 percent, its closest to the Fed’s 2 percent goal in 2-1/2 years. Meanwhile, the U.S. unemployment rate held at 4.9 percent in February, near the level many Fed officials believe represents full employment.

The European Central Bank’s decision last week to ease policy further may help add to confidence that action has been taken to underpin growth in Europe, helping ensure a stalling of global growth drag on the U.S.

That could mean another U.S. rate hike by mid-year and, depending on economic data, more to come after that.

“June seems certainly like a possibility” for the Fed’s next rate hike, said former Minneapolis Fed President Narayana Kocherlakota, whose own preference is for the Fed to take out “insurance” against a recession by cutting rates back to near zero. Market-based inflation expectations have improved somewhat since the Fed’s last meeting, he said, “a real positive” development.

INFLATION DEBATE

Still, Kocherlakota’s former colleagues will likely spend plenty of time discussing the inflation outlook. That much was clear last week, when two top Fed officials, speaking simultaneously at separate Washington events, gave diverging assessments of recent evidence of rising prices.

More hawkish rate setters worry that if the Fed does not act to preempt inflation, it could end up behind the curve and lose credibility, while the more dovish members believe the economic recovery is still fragile and want to see firm evidence of inflationary pressures.

“That’s probably internally the biggest grounds for debate,” said Regions Financial Corporation economist Richard Moody.

The Fed will also need to tackle how to characterize the “balance of risks” to their baseline outlook, he said, particularly if policymakers want to keep the door open to rate hikes in April or June.

“If they truly want the markets to believe that all the meetings are on the table (for a potential rate hike) then I would think they have to have something in there,” Moody said, predicting they will characterize risks as “nearly balanced,” the same phrase they used before December’s rate hike.

And yet, others say, Fed Chair Janet Yellen will be wary of sending too strong a signal of coming rate hikes, for fear of roiling markets.

“By June they will have a broad clutch of data and that could help them, and even some of the doves the Federal Open Market Committee, to come to a solid conclusion (on the desirability of a rate hike) and a conclusion, by the way, that the market agrees with,” said Quincy Krosby, a market strategist for Prudential Financial.

(Reporting by Ann Saphir; Editing by Meredith Mazzilli)

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SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Gold bounced back on Monday, inching closer to last week’s 13-month high as the dollar remained under pressure ahead of the U.S. Federal Reserve’s policy meeting.

The U.S. dollar was at one-month lows against a basket of major currencies with the Fed seen almost certain to stand pat at this week’s policy review.

Spot gold had risen 0.5 percent to $1,254.70 an ounce by 0212 GMT, while U.S. gold eased 0.3 percent to $1,256 an ounce.

The main focus is the U.S. central bank’s policy meeting on March 15-16, after it lifted rates for the first time in nearly a decade in December.

Investors in the precious metals market are also looking at a Bank of Japan meet.

The BOJ’s policy board is set to discuss this week whether to exempt $90 billion in short-term funds from its newly imposed negative interest rate, people familiar with the matter said, after the securities industry warned that investment money would be driven into bank deposits.

“We have two central bank meetings this week as the BOJ commence a two-day meeting today and the FOMC announce their interest rate decision on Wednesday,” said MKS Group trader Sam Laughlin.

Support at $1,235 should keep the metal buoyant leading into the Fed announcement, while $1,275-$1,280 will likely cap any moves higher, the trader said.

After rolling out bold measures to boost the euro zone economies, including increased asset-buying and a deeper cut to deposit rates, ECB President Mario Draghi on Thursday signalled there would be no further rate cuts.

The relatively weak dollar and a repricing of expectations for U.S. interest rate rises have helped gold rebound by more than 18 percent this year.

Bullion regained its role as a shelter for risk-averse investors, in the face of tumbling equities and fears of a global economic slowdown.

Hedge funds and money managers increased their bullish position in COMEX gold to the highest in 13 months in the week to March 8, U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission data showed on Friday, as safe-haven buying lifted prices to the highest since February 2015.

Physical gold demand slowed in top consumer China last week, while a strike by jewellers protesting against the imposition of a tax curbed demand in No. 2 market India.

(Reporting by Naveen Thukral; Editing by Richard Pullin and Joseph Radford)

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HONG KONG (Reuters) – Samsonite International S.A. <1910.HK> said on Friday it would buy Tumi Holdings Inc <TUMI.N> for $26.75 per share in an all-cash transaction valuing Tumi at $1.8 billion, as the world’s biggest luggage group expands in the luxury market.

Hong Kong-listed Samsonite said it would finance the deal with bank loans and that the transaction was expected to close in the second half of the year subject to regulatory and shareholder approvals.

Investors applauded the deal, sending Samsonite shares up to as much as HK$25.2, their highest since October. The stock trimmed gains but was up 2.3 percent by midday, outpacing a 0.6 percent gain in the benchmark Hang Seng Index <.HSI>.

“It is a perfect match in many aspects such as retail channels and regional mix, category mix and even price points,” said Boyoung Kim, an analyst at BNP Paribas.

“It can bring huge synergies in the long term,” she added.

The deal price represents a 38 percent premium to New Jersey-based Tumi’s volume weighted average price of $19.34 for the five days up to and including March 2, the statement said.

Tumi’s net sales increased 4 percent year-on-year in 2015 to $548 million, of which North America accounted for 68 percent. Its net income rose 8.6 percent last year to $63 million.

Samsonite Chief Executive Officer Ramesh Tainwala said the company planned to expand Tumi’s presence in Asia and Europe, while strengthening its business in North America.

Morgan Stanley Asia Ltd acted as financial advisor to Samsonite, and Goldman Sachs & Co. acted as financial advisor to Tumi.

Apart from its flagship brand, Samsonite sells Lipault travel bags, high-end Hartmann suitcases, American Tourister luggage, and High Sierra and Gregory backpacks.

The company has been on an acquisition spree, buying last February Rolling Luggage, which operates stores in airports, and Italian travel luggage retailer Chic Accent in October.

Samsonite is also keen to expand its reach to offset slowing growth in China, which accounts for about 10 percent its global sales. The company has previously said it expected its China sales growth to halve from the second half of the year.

(Reporting by Donny Kwok; Editing by Stephen Coates and Miral Fahmy)

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