Category: TRENDS ON THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC FRONT

The number of emerging nations with troubled sovereign bonds has doubled in the first half of this year to include 19 nations that are home to 900 million people, with El Salvador, Egypt, Ghana, Pakistan, and Tunisia especially vulnerable, Bloomberg reported. The value of the distressed debt has reached $237 billion, about 17 percent of...

Each week, we report instances where the money junky hedge funds, private equity groups and the already big companies swallow another piece of the global economy. Here are some more of what the BIGS have been gobbling up and how the Bigs keep getting bigger and the rich keep getting richer. It should be noted...

CHINA’S ECONOMY RETURNS TO GROWTH IN JUNE After contracting for three consecutive months, China’s economy grew modestly in June. The country’s official purchasing managers index (PMI) for the services sector grew to 54.7 last month from 47.8 in May as China lifted its three-month anti-COVID lockdown of more than 325 million people in 46 metro...

EUROZONE INFLATION RISES TO 8.6 PERCENT IN JUNE Another month, another 40-year record for inflation in the 19-country Eurozone. Prices rose 8.6 across the region in June, year over year, accelerating from 8.1 percent in May and rocketing up faster than at any time since 1997 when records began to be kept. Prices in Spain...

Sweden’s Riksbank became the latest national bank to take action against inflation, raising its key interest rate by a half-point to 0.75 percent last week. Inflation ran at 7.2 percent in Sweden during this year’s first quarter, the fastest pace since 1991 and almost four times the bank’s 2-percent target rate. “The policy rate will...

Around the world, factories are seeing slower demand for their products, or cutting production outright, as prices climb, interest rates rise, and central banks are shutting off the spigots of cheap money that defined the COVID era. As prices began rising early in 2021, central banks assumed incorrectly that consumers’ surging post-COVID demand would be...

Foreign-exchange traders are selling currencies of emerging nations and stockpiling dollars, according to The Wall Street Journal. Earlier this year, traders were grabbing developing countries’ currencies such as the Brazilian real and the South African rand. Commodity prices were heading skyward and the two nations, like many developing economies, depend on exporting raw materials for...