As we had long forecast, the higher central banks raise interest rates, the lower the Merger and Acquisition trend... which hit record highs during the COVID war when interest rates sank and governments pumped in countless trillions to artificially prop up sinking economies.
China’s manufacturing and services sector both slowed in May, offering more evidence that the growth spurt early this year after the government lifted anti-COVID restrictions has not lasted.
Portugal’s environmental regulators have given a positive recommendation on Savannah Resources’ proposed Barroso lithium mine that will produce enough of the metal to supply 500,000 electric vehicles (EVs) annually, the company says.
Nations’ bank overseers must increase their budgets dramatically to step up supervision in the wake of March’s twin collapse of Signature and Silicon Valley banks in the U.S. and Credit Suisse’s failure in Switzerland, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) said in a statement last week.
After a tense weekend meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and their allies (OPEC+), Saudi Arabia announced it would pare back its oil production by one million barrels per day in an attempt to push crude prices higher.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula on Tuesday threw his support behind a common South American currency—something like the euro—that he said would provide a strengthened monetary policy and “better compensation mechanisms” for trading.
Saudi Arabia is in discussions about joining the New Development Bank (NDB), an increasingly important lender to developing nations.
In April, the price of a loaf of plain white bread in the U.K. was 28 percent higher than a year before. In Germany, cheese costs 40 percent more and potatoes 14 percent.
Although inflation in the Eurozone settled to 6.1 percent in May, its lowest in 14 months, European Central Bank (ECB) president Christine Lagarde said in a public statement that inflation is “still too high” and the central bank must raise its base interest rate even more to rein it back.
Across the 20-country Eurozone, inflation’s rate fell to 6.1 percent in May, down from 7 percent in April and reaching the slowest pace since February 2022 when Russia attacked Ukraine, the European Union’s statistics agency announced.