January 01, 2026 (MLN): The foreign exchange reserves held by the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) increased by $12.6 million or 0.08% WoW to $15.92 billion during the week ended on December 26, 2025, data released by State Bank of Pakistan showed on Thursday.
On the other hand, the country’s total reserves decreased by $10.4m or 0.05% WoW to $21.01bn.
The reserves held by commercial banks fell by $23m or 0.45% WoW to $5.1bn.
In the current fiscal year, SBP-held reserves have increased by $6.85bn or 75.58%.
Meanwhile, the current calendar year has seen an increase of $4.2bn or 35.9%.
Summary of Holding and Weekly Change
Foreign reserves held by
December 26, 2025
December 19, 2025
Change
% Change
State Bank of Pakistan
15,915.1
15,902.5
12.6
0.08%
Net Foreign Reserves Held by Banks
5,097.1
5,120.1
-23.0
-0.45%
Total Liquid Foreign Reserves
21,012.2
21,022.6
-10.4
-0.05%
Amount in USD Million
The State Bank of Pakistan also released monthly data showing its foreign exchange reserves increased in November 2025, with SBP-held reserves rising by $85.9m to $14,588.8m, compared to $14,502.9m in October 2025.
On a year-on-year basis, SBP’s reserves rose by $2,551m, or 21.19%, from $12,037.9m in November 2024.
Net foreign reserves held by commercial banks stood at $4,548.3m, down from $4,671.1m a month earlier, showing a decline of $122.8m.
Compared to $4,090.6m in November last year, commercial banks’ reserves increased by $457.7m, or 11.19%.
Total liquid foreign exchange reserves held by the country at the end of November 2025 stood at $19,137.1m, compared to $19,174m in the previous month, reflecting a net decrease of $36.9m.
On a yearly basis, Pakistan’s total reserves increased by $3,008.6m, or 18.66%, from $16,128.5m in November 2024.
Looking at the fiscal year trend, reserves have shown significant recovery from $15,598.7m in January 2025, marking an improvement of $3,538.4m, or 22.71%, over the ten-month period ending November 2025.
Hartford HealthCare has named Adam C. Steinberg, DO, MBA, FACOG, FACS, as President of the newly formed Greater Manchester Region, a role that will focus on strengthening care, access and services for patients across the Manchester and Vernon area and surrounding communities.
Dr. Steinberg brings nearly 20 years of experience as a physician leader at Hartford Hospital, where he most recently served as Vice President of Medical Affairs. In that role, he helped guide clinical teams, supported quality and safety initiatives and worked closely with physicians and caregivers to improve patient care.
For the ninth consecutive year, Hartford Hospital earned an “A” Hospital Safety Grade for Fall 2025 from the Leapfrog Group, a national nonprofit watchdog. Hartford Hospital also was named a Leapfrog “Top Teaching Hospital” for the fifth consecutive year. It is one of only 73 hospitals nationwide to earn the honor in 2025.
“I am grateful for the opportunity to lead this new region and support the care teams who serve these communities,” Dr. Steinberg said. “Hartford HealthCare is known for strong patient care, safety and community partnerships. We are excited to build on that foundation to better meet the needs of patients here.”
As President of the Greater Manchester Region, Dr. Steinberg will help lead efforts to support caregivers, strengthen quality and safety and guide investments in services, technology and facilities. His leadership will play an important role as Hartford HealthCare works to expand access to care and meet the evolving needs of patients and families in the region.
Dr. Steinberg is a board-certified specialist with extensive clinical and operational experience. He is widely respected for his collaborative leadership style and commitment to patient-centered care. During his tenure at Hartford Hospital, he played a key role in advancing quality and safety initiatives and supporting care teams through complex challenges, including the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hartford HealthCare has named Adam C. Steinberg, DO, MBA, FACOG, FACS, as President of the newly formed Greater Manchester Region, a role that will focus on strengthening care, access and services for patients across the Manchester and Vernon area and surrounding communities.
Dr. Steinberg brings nearly 20 years of experience as a physician leader at Hartford Hospital, where he most recently served as Vice President of Medical Affairs. In that role, he helped guide clinical teams, supported quality and safety initiatives and worked closely with physicians and caregivers to improve patient care.
For the ninth consecutive year, Hartford Hospital earned an “A” Hospital Safety Grade for Fall 2025 from the Leapfrog Group, a national nonprofit watchdog. Hartford Hospital also was named a Leapfrog “Top Teaching Hospital” for the fifth consecutive year. It is one of only 73 hospitals nationwide to earn the honor in 2025.
“I am grateful for the opportunity to lead this new region and support the care teams who serve these communities,” Dr. Steinberg said. “Hartford HealthCare is known for strong patient care, safety and community partnerships. We are excited to build on that foundation to better meet the needs of patients here.”
As President of the Greater Manchester Region, Dr. Steinberg will help lead efforts to support caregivers, strengthen quality and safety and guide investments in services, technology and facilities. His leadership will play an important role as Hartford HealthCare works to expand access to care and meet the evolving needs of patients and families in the region.
Dr. Steinberg is a board-certified specialist with extensive clinical and operational experience. He is widely respected for his collaborative leadership style and commitment to patient-centered care. During his tenure at Hartford Hospital, he played a key role in advancing quality and safety initiatives and supporting care teams through complex challenges, including the COVID-19 pandemic.
The excitement around artificial intelligence led to a record year for certain types of fundraising.
Silicon Valley’s AI companies secured record funding in 2025, even as investors advised startups to shore up as much capital as possible before a potential AI bust.
The largest private U.S. companies raised a record $150 billion in 2025, overshadowing the previous high of $92 billion raised in 2021, according to a report by the Financial Times, citing private market data provider PitchBook.
Private investors allocated the majority of the capital to the biggest AI companies, such as OpenAI and Anthropic. The companies need an unprecedented amount of money to launch as they scramble to build the expensive infrastructure and hire the thought leaders that AI requires.
Companies are creating cash cushions — also known as fortress balance sheets — to protect themselves from a possible downturn.
Much of the funding was flowing to the largest companies in the largest deals. The top four deals accounted for more than 30% of the total deal value.
In 2025, OpenAI raised $40 billion, the largest private round in history, Anthropic raised $13 billion, Elon Musk’s xAI raised $10 billion and Meta acquired data labeling startup Scale AI for nearly $15 billion.
The concentration of capital could be bad for the industry, Kyle Stanford, a PitchBook analyst covering the venture capital industry, wrote in a report.
“Market value concentration indicates an increase in long-term systemic risk to venture capital, as that value has proven difficult to realize, even while private market values keep growing and revenue multiples reach unsustainable levels,” he said in the report.
Companies including SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic could list their shares as early as 2026.
Several other AI companies surpassed the $2-billion funding mark over the year, including Jeff Bezos’ Project Prometheus and Databricks.
The AI hype has taken over the public market as well. Nine of the top 10 most valuable companies in the world are tech companies riding the AI wave. Companies including Nvidia, Microsoft and Alphabet are worth more than $3 trillion each now.
The productivity gains from AI automating tasks have started affecting early career jobs, and sparked political pushback against automation. Yet, the 2026 promise rests on the wider adoption of “AI agents” — systems that can understand user intent and autonomously do tasks such as shopping, planning holidays and executing complex decisions — becoming a larger part of the economy.
To will that future into reality, Big Tech companies are projected to invest more than $500 billion in 2026 to build AI infrastructure, including networks and data centers.
“The risks then become not in the potential loss of capital should these companies fail, but in the market-wide losses if underlying technologies can’t live up to the hype and generate meaningful impact on the economy,” Stanford of PitchBook wrote.
The Pettit National Ice Center has made Milwaukee a destination for the Olympic speedskating world. Now, the first indoor speedskating oval built in the U.S. is going solar.
The arena contains enough ice to fill more than five National Hockey League rinks. Like most ice centers, it requires a significant amount of energy to keep its skating surface frozen and dry.
The solar project will cut the 200,000-square-foot facility’s energy use by at least 20 percent and power the building during summer months.
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It’s funded by a large donation gifted to the nonprofit by the climate-focused VoLo Foundation.
Paul Golomski is the Pettit Ice Center’s general manager. He believes the project will help the facility use energy more responsibly.
“There’s only five (indoor speedskating ovals) in North America, and there’s only 40 operating in the entire world,” Golomski said. “So I think it’s a really smart thing for us to invest in and to ensure that we’re being responsible stewards of our energy consumption.”
He says over a 20-year period, the system will have the impact of reducing the center’s CO2 emissions by 12,778 tons. That’s equal to 191,000 trees planted, or 29,053,530 miles driven by cars.
Milwaukee-based renewable energy company Arch Solar is leading the project — a 690 kilowatt system consisting of 1,200 bifacial solar panels. This allows each panel to absorb sunlight from its front and back sides, producing more energy.
Andrew Holmstrom is the business development supervisor at Arch Solar. He said the panels will generate enough energy to power a string of Christmas lights from Milwaukee to North Carolina.
“It’s going to be a clean, green rooftop power plant,” Holmstrom said.
Holmstrom previously lived across the highway from the ice center.
“I’ve been able to skate on the ice there, run inside there, and so to be able to be a part of this project and kind of leave our fingerprint on the building, it means so much,” Holmstrom said.
Arch Solar has been on the roof since late November. They hope to have it ready by early April.
The Pettit National Ice Center is an official training site for U.S. Speedskating. It opened in 1992. The facility will host the U.S. Olympic Team Trials Long Track competition Jan. 2-5.
A major tungsten deposit near the Yukon-N.W.T. border has been attracting plenty of money and attention in Canada and the United States, but getting the critical mineral to market from its remote Mactung site will be no easy feat.
The Mactung property is considered to be among the world’s largest high-grade deposits of tungsten.
It’s attracted attention — and money — from both the American and Canadian governments. It also lies in a hard to access area on the Yukon-N.W.T. border.
The deposit lies at the end of the North Canol road, an artery completed by the American army in 1943 as part of the Second World War–era Canol Project, which supported development of the Norman Wells oilfield in the Northwest Territories and construction of a military oil pipeline.
Today, it’s a narrow, rough gravel track that’s best tackled with a four-wheel drive. It stretches about 250 kilometres from Ross River, Yukon, to the N.W.T. border.
Fireweed Metals bought the Mactung property from the N.W.T. government in 2022. The company’s latest geotechnical assessment from 2023 (Mineral Resource Estimate or MRE) describes it as “the world’s largest, high-grade tungsten deposit … with sufficient mineral resources to potentially supply North America’s expected tungsten demand for decades.”
A year ago, the U.S. Department of Defense and the Canadian governments announced up to $35 million in combined funding for initial planning.
Fireweed CEO Ian Gibbs says the money is being used for preliminary feasibility studies on upgrading the North Canol road from Ross River to MacMillan Pass and to explore the feasibility of building a power line from Ross River to MacMillan Pass.
Gibbs says it’s quite unusual for governments to simply give money to mining companies.
“I can say it’s the first time in my career, it’s the first time I’ve ever been with a company that’s received government funding, to be honest with you. And I think that speaks to the critical nature of the assets that we have in Mac Pass but in particular the tungsten assets.”
Project in early stages
Gibbs says it’s very early days in the planning.
He concedes that even if the road were upgraded and a power line installed, getting ore across the Pelly River at Ross River would still present a challenge.
“I think it’s safe to say that the cable barge at Ross River is definitely on its last legs … a bridge over the Pelly in the Ross River area would be an advantage to any kind of mineral development. It would be ideal if there were a bridge.”
Gibbs says the company has had “discussions” with the Yukon government about a bridge across the Pelly River, but he says that decision lies firmly with the Ross River Dena Council and the Yukon government.
The Mactung project is right on the border between the Northwest Territories and the Yukon. Fireweed Metals, the company that bought the property, is conducting feasibility studies on upgrading the North Canol road from Ross to MacMillan Pass and building a power line from Ross River to MacMillan Pass. (Fireweed Metals)
He says nothing will happen in the area without the consent and participation of the affected First Nations. The North Canol road cuts through the heart of Ross River Dena Council traditional territory, and the project also lies on the traditional territory of the First Nation of Nacho Nyäk Dun.
He says Fireweed Metals is eager to work with the First Nations, in particular the Ross River Dena Council.
“There’s no question. Without the nations seeing an appropriate sharing of benefits and enhancing their capacity, you’re very challenged to get a mining project (going). We would like to take these projects forward but we have to do it with a long term relationship built on trust and make sure that there’s opportunities for benefits to be shared,” he said.
Gibbs admits that environmental issues left behind from other Yukon mines is a challenge for his company, but he says the Mactung deposit is different.
“Given it’s such a high grade, it will likely be a very small footprint. So it’s gonna be two-thousand tonnes per day … not a 20-thousand tonne [operation]. It will likely be underground, not open pit. It won’t have a heap leach, it will likely have dry stacked tailings so we’re very aware of these past issues.”
In a statement to CBC last year after the funding for the mine was announced, the First Nation of Nacho Nyäk Dun said it had moral and environmental concerns about tungsten mining. Tungsten is used in weapons manufacturing.
Gibbs says a common misconception is that tungsten is used only in the manufacture of weapons.
“It’s used in the manufacture of semiconductors, it’s used in aerospace, it’s used in tungsten carbide — so the hardest thing known, next to a diamond — used extensively in manufacturing and construction, oil and gas … approximately 10 per cent of tungsten goes into defense applications.”
U.S. eager to see tungsten production in North America
Gibbs says it’s not surprising that the United States is casting a covetous keen eye on Mactung.
He says right now China, Russia and North Korea dominate tungsten production and control the world’s markets of the critical mineral, something the Americans want to change.
“They clearly are looking to see primary production of tungsten in North America because as it stands right now there is zero … they are looking to make sure the North American supply chain has what is required, including tungsten.”
Gibbs says North American production of tungsten ceased in 2015 when the Cantung mine in southwest N.W.T. closed.
“If you speak with people who know tungsten I think it’s almost universally accepted that Mactung is a globally strategic asset given both the resource size and the resource grade.”
Ted Laking, the Yukon’s newly appointed minister of energy, mines and resources, says the territory’s mining industry is getting a lot of attention.
“Right now what I see from the federal government and lots of people around the world is a lot of interest in the Yukon and I think that’s an exciting thing.”
Laking says it’s early in his tenure and he hasn’t yet spoken with his federal counterparts or, in the case of the Mactung project, the Ross River Dena Council.
As for possibly upgrading the North Canol or building a power line to MacMillan Pass, Laking says decisions of that size would need federal backing.
“The federal government holds the purse strings on large infrastructure projects.” But he says developing “critical minerals and upgrading infrastructure in the territory to support the economy are going to be big priorities” for the new Yukon government.
As for any talk of a bridge across the Pelly River, Laking says the Yukon will wait to see the results of the feasibility studies.
“When it comes to the construction of things like a bridge on a public road, absolutely that would have to be a decision for the government of Yukon and the affected First Nation. But at this point there’s no plans for a bridge.”
For now, Gibbs says Fireweed will continue its initial studies, but he doesn’t expect production at Mactung to happen for years, at least not before 2030.
“You can’t just snap your fingers and make a mine. You need to go through the various steps and make sure you get all the various rights holders and stakeholders lined up. It needs to be done responsibly. And that’s what we’re committed to.”
The auto-enrolment pension is a landmark reform which will help people to secure their future with dignity and financial independence, a Fine Gael TD has said.
Chair of the Oireachtas Social Protection Committee, Deputy John Paul O’Shea said, “Too many workers around Ireland are facing retirement solely reliant on the State pension. Auto-enrolment changes that by ensuring most workers will automatically start saving for retirement.”
The system automatically includes workers earning over €20,000, aged between 23 and 60, as well as those who are not already part of a pension scheme.
For every €3 an employee contributes, their employer will add another €3 while the state will top it up by €1.
“This means that €7 will be invested for every €3 saved, and creates a powerful mechanism to grow retirement funds,” he said.
Deputy O’Shea emphasised the system is about securing your future, “It ensures that hard work today translates to financial security tomorrow. Fine Gael has always believed in empowering people to plan ahead and this reform is a practical step towards ensuring every worker has the means to retire with confidence.”
Families can plan for the future knowing that retirement savings are being built consistently, while employers share responsibility in supporting their staff’s financial wellbeing.
Deputy O’Shea concluded by describing auto-enrolment as a transformational policy which will benefit generations to come:
“I encourage all eligible employees to embrace this opportunity and take pride in knowing their retirement will be supported by a system which is designed to protect them.”
