Northvolt, Europe’s premier maker of batteries for electric vehicles (EVs), is looking to expand its presence in the U.S., lured by at least $369 million in financial incentives offered through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to build a factory here, compared to Germany’s offer of about €155 million, the Financial Times reported.
To keep the weapons flowing into Ukraine, the U.S. Department of Defense announced last week that it authorized a presidential drawdown valued at up to $400 million, which is the 26th drawdown since August 2021.
In this year’s third quarter, Japan’s economy contracted for the first time in a year, shrinking 1.2 percent as galloping inflation raised import costs and the yen’s value sank to its lowest in decades.
Last week, Jeremy Hunt, the U.K.’s finance minister, formally known as Chancellor of the Exchequer, defended his government’s £55 billion in spending cuts and tax increases designed to dig Britain out of its debts, tame an inflation rate of 11 percent, and convince investors that the U.K. is on the path to financial stability.
This is the headline on the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal: “OPEC + Weighs Pumping More Oil.”
Interest-rate futures markets are betting that Chile’s central bank will chop more than 5 percentage points from its current 11.25-percent rate by the end of next year, according to Bloomberg.
Validating analysts’ our forecasts cited in “Future Rate Hikes Will Be Smaller” in this issue, on 21 November the Bank of Israel (BoI) increased its base interest rate by a half-point, not the three-quarters of a point that analysts had expected.
Central banks’ future rate hikes will be smaller, analysts say, because recent large rate boosts are showing signs of taming inflation—and because signs are growing that a worldwide economic recession is looming.
Inflation and interest rate hikes are causing companies in many sectors to lay off employees. To illustrate the employment trends and the socioeconomic implications, each week we list job losses.
Workers are returning to companies’ central offices but not in the numbers that pertained to before the COVID War. There is “dimming hope that office buildings will ever refill,” The Wall Street Journal noted.