Category: TRENDS ON THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC FRONT

Goldman Sachs has continued its buying spree by agreeing to pay $2.2 billion, or about $12 a share, for GreenSky Inc., which makes loans for major one-time purchases such as kitchen remodeling or medical procedures. GreenSky works with big-box retailers, medical providers, and others to offer loans that it says are cheaper than credit card...

Chinese real estate giant Evergrande, with 200,000 employees and more than 1,300 residential developments across the country, owes $300 billion and has warned investors that it might have no alternative but to default. That announcement brought investors literally to the company’s doors, demanding their money back, and jolted analysts and the real estate industry to...

Tighter regulation of the housing and tech markets, flooding during the vacation season, and China’s declared “zero tolerance” policy toward the Delta virus slowed the country’s consumer spending to a growth rate of 2.5 percent in August, about $534 billion worth, year on year, compared to July’s 8.5 percent, The Wall Street Journal reported. The...

Asset manager Blackrock’s China New Horizons Mixed Securities Investment Fund, the first domestic mutual fund the country’s government has permitted a foreign entity to operate, has raised about 6.68 billion yuan, roughly $1 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. The fund took in 111,000 orders from investors during an initial five-day marketing period earlier...

China’s foreign trade grew 23.7 percent from January through August this year, compared to 2020, to a value equivalent to about $3.4 trillion, according to the country’s General Administration of Customs (GAC).  Exports grew 23.2 percent over the period and jumped 25.6 percent in August alone, up from July’s 19.3 percent and zooming past analysts’...

In developing nations, people typically pay a significantly higher portion of their incomes for food staples, such as wheat and cooking oil. Now, with food prices soaring around the world to their highest prices in a decade, according to the Financial Times, those governments face a dilemma: do they raise interest rates to tackle inflation...

Wholesale natural gas prices across much of Europe are now about five times more than they were in 2019, pushing up consumers’ electric bills in Spain by as much as 40 percent, the Financial Times reported. The price has risen from about $4 per million British thermal units to $18, the FT noted. Soaring prices...

Vehicle production at Maruti Suzuki India, which makes and ships more cars than any other maker on the subcontinent, is likely to fall 40 percent below normal this month because of “a supply constraint of electronic components due to the semiconductor shortage situation,” the company reported in a regulatory filing earlier this month. Maruti expects...

Not only restaurants are having trouble hiring: in many parts of the world, farming and food-processing sectors are finding far fewer workers than they need, Bloomberg reported. Brazil’s coffee growers needed 120 days to close this year’s harvest instead of the usual 90, due to a shortage of pickers; Vietnam has drafted army troops to...

The global supply-chain gridlock—a tangle of materials shortages and transport snarls—will remain unsolved until some time next year, according to manufacturers and transport company executives, Bloomberg reported, as did we in “China Closes Key Port Terminal: Trouble Ahead,” 24 August, 2021. The tangles include: The COVID virus’s Delta variant, which is shutting down production in...