The International Monetary Fund (IMF) gave a “stinging rebuke” to the government of British Prime Minister Liz Truss over her plan for massive tax cuts—the most drastic since 1972—while also initially borrowing more than £72 billion to subsidize household energy bills, the Financial Times reported.
Nigeria’s central bank has raised its benchmark interest rate to an all-time high of 15.5 percent.
The skyrocketing price of electricity has pushed Slovakia’s economy to the brink of “collapse,” prime minister Eduard Heger said last week in a public warning.
Cotton futures prices have slid 25 percent since late August, reversing the rise in price that followed the U.S. agriculture department’s forecast that 40 percent of this year’s U.S. cotton harvest would be lost to drought.
On 29 September, Mexico’s central bank raised its benchmark interest rate to a record 9.25 percent.
In the second quarter of this year, Canadian business starts fell by more than 49 percent compared to a year earlier and compared to the same quarter in 2019, according to the Equifax credit reporting agency.
Germany’s government will provide a €200-billion “shield” for businesses and low-income households grappling with relentlessly rising energy bills, the government announced last week.
Emerging nations and wobbly corporations needing to refinance debt will need to pay interest an average of 1.56 percentage points higher than the current rate for the same securities—a total of $1.01 billion extra, according to Bloomberg’s analysis of bonds owed by current public-and private-sector debtors.
Dragflation: Economic growth declining and inflation rising... plus the pressure of interest rate hikes that are drying up the cheap money pool are causing companies in many sectors to lay off employees.
On 27 September, lumber futures prices dropped to $429.30 per thousand board feet, falling 60 percent from their peak last March to levels preceding the COVID era and its building boom, according to Random Lengths, an industry research service.