Category: TRENDS ON THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC FRONT

News Corp, the owner of the Wall Street Journal and other business periodicals, has agreed to pay $349 million to buy the consumer or “trade” book division of Boston-based Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. It was not specified whether Houghton would remain as its own brand or be subsumed by News Corp’s HarperCollins book imprint. Houghton’s list...

Not only airlines were crippled by the global collapse of air travel last year; U.S. airport shops and restaurants will lose $3.4 billion from July 2020 through December 2021, according to the Airport Restaurant and Retail Association. The figure equals about three years’ profit for airport retailers. Dubai Duty Free, a leading operator of airport...

On 22 March, Turkey’s financial markets seized up and its currency’s value slid after the weekend firing of central bank governor Naci Agbal. The lira, Turkey’s currency, lost 11 percent of its value for the week and the Borsa Istanbul 100 stock index fell 9.6 percent. Of the $16 billion in currency swaps that came...

For the ninth consecutive year, Japan’s legislature has passed a record-high budget, this time calling for ¥106.61 trillion to expand the social safety net to care for the world’s oldest population, handle increased national defense costs, and pay bills related to the COVID pandemic. Defense spending climbed to ¥5.34 trillion, its seventh consecutive record, as...

In Portugal and Denmark, where commercial interest rates have dipped below zero, some people with mortgages collect monthly payments from their lenders. Negative mortgage interest rates made their debut in 2014 when the European Central Bank cut benchmark rates to -0.25 percent to spark the Eurozone’s lagging economy. The arrangement was intended to be brief...

Although the global economy has slightly recovered from the COVID War that resulted in massive lockdowns, broad areas and populations are being left behind, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has again warned. “We are seeing overall improvement in the global economy, but with many countries and people…left behind,” IMF spokesman Gerry Rice said in a...

As we noted in the U.S. Markets Overview, one of the reasons for the fall in today’s Dow was growing concern over what we term the “Archegos Capital Management calamity,” which illustrates how rigged the equity markets are and how Wall Street is completely disconnected with Main Street.   Credit Suisse and Nomura are among the...

As we reported in the Geopolitical section of this Trends Journal,  as evidenced by last week’s meeting with U.S. and Chinese government officials, Beijing will not take orders or follow rules set by Washington. (See our new article, “CHINA TELLS U.S TO FU.”) And, as we have forecast, the 20th century was the American century...

The U.K.’s flagship air carrier may sell its nine-building campus abutting London’s Heathrow Airport, the company has said. The move would respond to employees’ desire to work from home and would raise desperately-needed cash for International Consolidated Airlines Group (ICA), the airline’s parent company, which reported a record £7.4-billion loss last year and is in...

Two days after Turkey’s central bank raised a benchmark interest rate, Recip Erdogan, the country’s president, fired Naci Agbal, the bank’s governor, whom Erdogan had appointed to the post in November. Erdogan gave no reason for dismissing his chief banker. After Agbal was sacked, Turkey’s lira lost as much as 14 percent of its value...