As 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.
First Republic Bank, which has teetered on the edge of failure since Signature and Silicon Valley banks collapsed in mid-March, was seized by regulators on 1 May.
The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) raised its base interest rate a quarter point last week, only a month after it announced a pause in rate increases so it could assess the economic impact of its higher rates.
Ocean shipping giant AP Moller-Maersk reported first-quarter profits of $2.3 billion, two-thirds less than the same quarter in 2022. Revenue fell by 25 percent to $14.2 billion.
Deals involving Europe’s private equity firms transferring assets among themselves have fallen by more than 50 percent to €16.8 billion, year on year, as rising interest rates and a gloomy economic outlook have dimmed what the Financial Times called “buyout game of pass-the-parcel.”
Shut out of key parts of the world’s currency interchange by Western sanctions, Russia began accepting India’s rupees directly as payment for oil and other exports.
Chinese consumers spent lavishly through the Labor Day holidays during the first week of this month, a traditional barometer of the consumer economy’s future strength.
Europe’s benchmark price of natural gas sank to €35.20 per megawatt-hour on 5 May, its lowest since July 2021 when Russia first began cutting back its gas exports to the continent.
In this year’s first quarter, demand for diesel fuel and other petroleum distillates was about 6 percent lower than a year earlier, the Financial Times reported.
The European Central Bank (ECB) raised its base interest rate a quarter point on 4 May after making six consecutive half-point increases since embarking on its current campaign of tightening in July last year.