Norges Bank, Norway’s central bank, has raised its base rate from zero to 0.25 percent, citing business activity’s return to pre-COVID levels, a high COVID vaccination rate, and unemployment of just 2.7 percent. Another hike is likely in December, bank officials said, and as many as five more next year. Norges Bank is the first...
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DEVELOPMENT BANK TRIMS ASIA GROWTH FORECAST
Collectively, Asia’s developing nations will grow the region’s economy 7.1 percent this year, the Asia Development Bank (ADB) projected, instead of 7.3 percent, as the bank had forecast earlier. COVID’s Delta variant, the area’s slow and uneven progress in vaccinating citizens, and renewed lockdowns and restrictions on businesses and movement are to blame for the...
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RISKY LOAN BACKERS BEWARE
The next default crisis is taking root in the junk-bond and leveraged-loan markets, according to analysts at the S&P Global credit ratings service. As risk rises, interest rates typically do also to compensate investors for the greater chance of losing their money, the analysts note, but “just the opposite is now true,” they wrote in...
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CHINA’S ECONOMY SLOWING?
Beyond the potential collapse of Evergrande—the Chinese conglomerate toting more than $300 billion in debt, that missed a $83.5-million bond payment last week, and that has 1.6 million unfinished apartments on its hands—there are signs that China’s overall economy is losing momentum. However, we do not see as drastic a slowdown as Wall Street is...
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DELTA VIRUS HAMPERING GLOBAL RECOVERY, OECD SAYS
The COVID virus’s Delta variant is slowing the world’s economic recovery but will not cripple it, according to new forecasts from the 37-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in its latest quarterly report published 21 September. The U.S. economy will grow 6 percent this year, the OECD now says, not the 6.9 percent...
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BACKLOGGED SHIPS: NEW ABNORMAL
As of 19 September, the number of ships anchored off the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles waiting to load or unload cargo totaled 73, up from the 44 on 28 August that we reported in “Ships Clog = Inflation” (14 Sep 2021), according to the Marine Exchange of Southern California. Before the COVID...
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END OF FEDERAL JOBLESS BENEFIT WON’T BRING MANY BACK TO WORK
The end of the emergency federal $300 weekly unemployment benefit is unlikely to drive large numbers of workers back into the labor market, several studies by economists and the Financial Times have found. About 7.5 million potential workers were impacted when the COVID-era weekly subsidy ended on the 6 September federal cutoff date, the FT...
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HALF OF COVID’S JOBLESS GONE FOR GOOD?
Of the 5.5 million U.S. workers still jobless from the COVID War, more than half are not seeking work and no longer plan to, according to a report published last week by JP Morgan. “About half of the people who lost jobs during COVID are still actively looking for work, while the other half are...
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UNEMPLOYMENT CLAIMS CLIMB AGAIN
New claims for state jobless benefits bumped up to 351,000 in the most recent week, compared to 335,000 the week before and disappointing analysts’ expectations for just 320,000 new filings, labor department figures show. Continuing claims rose to 2.85 million, passing economists’ expectation of 2.6 million. The figures show the largest increases since July and...
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DEFAULT COULD ERASE SIX MILLION U.S. JOBS, MOODY’S SAYS
If Congress does not raise the debt limit and the U.S. defaults on its debts, the country would vaporize six million jobs, bounce the unemployment rate to 9 percent, and the economy could hurtle into a tailspin that would rival the Great Depression, Moody’s Analytics declared in a 21 September report, “Playing a Dangerous Game...