Category: TRENDS ON THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC FRONT

On 13 June, Japan’s yen slumped to ¥135.19 per dollar, breaking down through the historic low of ¥135.15 reached during Japan’s 2002 banking crisis and settling at its weakest value since 1998. It was the yen’s sixth consecutive day of losses, with the yen down 16 percent in value so far this year, making it...

Investors are placing short bets against Britain’s pound sterling currency amid rampant inflation and slowing economic growth, the Financial Times reported. The number of futures contracts wagering on a less-valuable pound is at its highest in three years, according to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. So far this year, the pound is down 7 percent...

When the European Central Bank (ECB) ends its bond-buying program that it has conducted since the COVID War broke out, there will be a “void” in demand for corporate debt, investors have warned, making it harder for large businesses to borrow money. The central bank has said it will stop buying bonds in this year’s...

Faced with decades-high inflation, the European Central Bank (ECB) has indicated it will raise its key interest rate from the -0.50 percent, where it has remained for eight years to a positive 0.25 percent this September. However, investors have overestimated the bank’s ability to raise rates aggressively enough to pull inflation back to its 2-percent...

Attempting to counter complaints that the European Central Bank (ECB) is doing nothing to address inflation, bank president Christine Lagarde last week said the bank is likely to raise its key rate a quarter-point next month and another half-point in September. The decision to announce the raises now was unanimous among the bank’s governing council,...

Businesses around the world are scaling back foreign investments because of rising interest rates, lingering fears of new COVID outbreaks, and uncertainties over Russia’s war in Ukraine, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development said in its annual report on global capital flows. Figures from this year’s first quarter show investment in new facilities...

The 38-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has pared its 2022 global growth forecast from 4.5 percent, which it forecast in December, to 3 percent, a one-third reduction. The prediction aligns with that of the World Bank, which now says worldwide GDP will expand by 2.9 percent this year instead of 4.1 percent,...

The European Central Bank (ECB) will take needed steps to ensure that the Eurozone avoids a debt crisis similar to the one during the Great Recession, ECB president Christine Lagarde said last week. In 2008, in several European countries, property bubbles burst, banking systems collapsed, governments flooded stimulus money into economies to save them, and...

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. FOOD SPECIALTY COMPANIES JOIN...

BIDEN SAYS HE CAN DO LITTLE TO REVERSE INFLATION The Biden administration has little power and few tools to control rising food and fuel prices, president Joe Biden said last week after meeting with Jerome Powell, chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve. The average U.S. gas price set a record at $4.82 per gallon on...