Category: TRENDS ON THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC FRONT

Ignoring warnings from its business community, Turkey’s central bank cut its overnight repo rate for the second time in two months, from 18 percent to 16 percent. The Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey has made a series of interest rate cuts this year, despite inflation running as high as 20 percent, according to...

Brazil’s treasury secretary, budget secretary, and their two chief aides abruptly resigned on 21 October after president Jair Bolsonaro pushed ahead with a spending plan designed to shower aid on households and jump-start a feeble economy but that also risks spiking inflation. Brazil’s central bank has already raised interest rates three times this year in...

China’s home prices have galloped to all-time highs in recent months in tandem with developers’ debt loads. The higher prices helped subsidize builders’ debt payments.  However, over the summer, Beijing tightened rules around lending to property developers, saying that the industry was overleveraged, a fact underscored by the ongoing debt crisis among building companies, which...

Through recent years, China’s insatiable construction industry has drawn a steady flow of imported materials from emerging nations. Now, however, giant property developers such as Evergrande and Fantasia are on the brink of collapse, as we documented in “Spotlight China: Crash Coming? Recovery Ahead?” (19 Oct 2021). As a result, exports of raw materials—a crucial...

After buying 51 percent of Greece’s Piraeus Port Authority in August 2016, China’s state-controlled Cosco shipping company has taken another 16 percent, the Financial Times reported. The deal has fanned anxieties about China’s deepening involvement in Europe’s infrastructure and drew outrage over environmental, financial, and social concerns surrounding China’s ownership. Cosco pledged to make investments...

As worldwide factory output shrank amid supply shortages and transport kinks, service economies grew as vaccination campaigns progressed and more people returned to gyms, hotels, restaurants, and stores, The Wall Street Journal reported. Service-sector strength powered net economic growth in Australia, Japan, and the U.S. However, Europe’s overall GDP has shrunk in recent weeks, due...

This is old news to Trends Journal subscribers, but new news in the mainstream state of mind. Public debt shouldered during the COVID Wars is only a portion of the financial perils facing the world in coming decades, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), whose members are the world’s 38 richest...

AVERAGE AMERICANS CAN’T AFFORD AVERAGE NEW CAR Even though computer chips have been in short supply, car makers had enough on hand to work through the spring and summer and even to make April a particularly strong sales month in the United States Now, those stashes of chips are gone and auto companies can only...

THE TOP 1 PERCENT IS RICHER THAN THE ENTIRE MIDDLE CLASS The richest 1 percent of U.S. households holds more wealth than the population earning from the 20th income percentile to the 80th, which encompasses the middle class, the upper middle class, and much of the working class, according to the U.S. Federal Reserve report...

CHINA: EMPEROR XI IN CHARGE China is on the move; it has big plans, and so does the man at its helm, President Xi Jinping. To help facilitate those plans, he has eliminated term limits on the presidency and put himself in a position to serve a third term, during which he hopes to further...