Legal consultant Karim Soaid, the brother of ex-MP Fares Soaid, has emerged as the leading candidate for the central bank governor post.

The European Union on Wednesday announced retaliatory trade action with new duties on U.S. industrial and farm products, responding within hours to the Trump administration's increase in tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports to 25%.

The world's biggest trading bloc was expecting the U.S. tariffs and prepared in advance, but the measures still place great strain on already tense transatlantic relations. Only last month, Washington warned Europe that it would have to take care of its own security in the future.

China wrapped up its biggest political event of the year on Tuesday leaving one question unanswered: How far will it go to try to revive economic growth in 2025?

A recurring theme throughout the weeklong meeting of the nearly 3,000-member National People's Congress was the need to boost investment and consumer spending.

Japan's trade minister said this week that he has failed to win assurances from U.S. officials that the key U.S. ally will be exempt from tariffs, some of which take effect on Wednesday.

Yoji Muto was in Washington for last ditch negotiations over the tariffs on a range of Japanese exports including cars, steel and aluminum.

Japan's has cut its estimate for its economic growth in the last quarter of the year to a 2.2% annual pace from 2.8% as consumer spending hit demand.

The Cabinet Office said Tuesday that Japan's real gross domestic product, which measures the sum value of a nation's goods and services, also was lower due to higher private inventories than earlier reported.

The United States does not appear to want to make a deal with Brussels to avoid hefty tariffs against the EU, the bloc's trade chief said Monday, days before US steel and aluminum levies kick in.

"The US administration does not seem to be engaging to make a deal," said Maros Sefcovic, who travelled to Washington last month in the hopes of reaching an agreement with U.S. officials to avert a trade war.

The United States has declined to renew a waiver that had allowed Iraq to buy electricity from Iran without running afoul of sanctions, a U.S. official said Sunday.

The previous waiver expired Saturday and the U.S. Department of State did not renew it, the U.S. embassy in Baghdad said in a statement.

World shares were mostly lower on Friday, with Tokyo's benchmark closing down more than 2% after a sell-off on Wall Street.

A report was due later Friday from the U.S. Labor Department on how many workers U.S. employers hired last month. Economists are expecting to see an acceleration in hiring for February.

China's exports rose a less-than-expected 2.3% in January and February from a year earlier while imports fell more than 8% in a slow start to a year dogged by uncertainty over U.S. tariffs and other policies.

Economists had forecast that exports would rise 5% year-on-year and that imports would edge higher. China's overall trade surplus grew to $170.52 billion in the first two months of the year.

The U.S. labor market likely kept on churning out jobs last month, economists say, but the outlook is cloudy and getting cloudier as the Trump administration wages trade wars, purges federal employees and seeks to deport millions of immigrants.

When the Labor Department releases February jobs numbers Friday, they're expected to show that employers added 160,000 jobs. That's far from spectacular but it's solid, and it's up from 143,000 in January. The unemployment rate is forecast to stay at a low 4%, according to economists surveyed by the data firm FactSet.