Category: TRENDS ON THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC FRONT

Seventy-four low-income nations have $35 billion in sovereign debt payments coming due this year, an amount 45 percent more than in 2020, according to World Bank figures. El Salvador, Ghana, and Tunisia are of particular concern; S&P Global has warned that Sri Lanka is facing default, the Financial Times reported. Lenders had suspended debt payments...

AS WE FORECAST: CHINA’S ECONOMY GROWS 8.1 PERCENT IN 2021 While much of the world was downgrading China’s GDP growth estimates for 2021, the Trends Journal had forecast it would grow by 8 percent. We were 0.1 percent off: China’s economy grew 8.1 percent overall in 2021 on the strength of its exports to a...

INFLATION IN OECD COUNTRIES TOUCHES 25-YEAR HIGH Inflation across member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which includes most of the world’s 37 richest countries, ran at 5.8 percent in November, compared to 1.2 percent a year earlier, according to OECD figures released last week. It was inflation’s fastest annual pace...

Germany’s economy contracted 0.5 to 1 percent during 2021’s final three months, according to a 14 January announcement by the nation’s statistics agency. Supply-chain turmoil, surging prices for raw materials, and the economic weakness of China, Germany’s largest trading partner, torpedoed the country’s manufacturing sector, especially vehicle manufacturers, upon which Germany’s economic performance depends significantly....

COVID’s Omicron strain, supply-line chaos, labor shortages, and the end of government and central-bank stimulus programs will combine to slow global economic growth this year, the World Bank has predicted. The world’s economic output grew by 5.5 percent in 2021, the best post-recession performance in 80 years, the bank said in its semi-annual Global Economic...

By the end of 2020, global debt surged the most in a single year since World War Two and reached a record $226 trillion, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reported.  In 2020, global debt added 26 percentage points to reach 256 percent of the world’s economic output, according to updated data from the IMF’s Global...

TAKEOVER FIRM HOPES FOR $877 MILLION FROM IPO TPG Capital, a buyout specialist formerly named Texas Pacific Group, is hoping to collect as much as $877 million from an initial public stock offering that would value the firm as highly as $9 billion, the Financial Times reported. TPG hopes to sell 28.3 million shares at...

TURKEY’S INFLATION RATE ZOOMS PAST 36 PERCENT IN DECEMBER Inflation in Turkey soared to 36.1 percent last month, the most in the 19 years that strongman president Recep Erdogan has ruled and enforced his notion that low interest rates counter consumer price increases. Inflation was running at 37 percent in September 2002, two months before...

INFLATION ENDANGERS EU RECOVERY, ANALYSTS WARN Europe’s economic recovery will be in danger if inflation continues to destroy consumers’ buying power and the European Central Bank (ECB) is forced to hike interest rates sooner than planned, according to 38 economists polled by the Financial Times. Inflation poses a “significant risk” to the 19-member Eurozone’s economic...

Germany’s bank regulating agency has fined Deutsche Bank, Germany’s richest bank, €8.7 million, equivalent to about $7.7 million, for failing to implement safeguards to prevent interest rate rigging. The bank had failed to adopt “effective preventive systems, controls, and policies” that would keep employees from colluding with counterparts at other institutions to set rates artificially,...