Category: Uncategorized

Similar to the Fed Reserve, the European Central Bank (ECB) has an inflation target of 2 percent. The ECB had spent $3 trillion over almost four years, buying government and corporate bonds, yet the EU economy is expected to grow only 1.2 percent this year and inflation just 1 percent. Christine Lagarde, the new head...

After an analyst at Swiss investment bank UBS publicly commented about a swine fever outbreak in China, the firm was disinvited to one of China’s major bond deals and the analyst was “put on leave.” Investment advisors and major banks have learned that lesson. When advising institutional investors and other major clients, the banks now...

Turkey’s central bank cut its interest rate for the fourth time this year, hoping to kickstart lending and revive economic growth. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan pressured the bank to cut rates by 10 points since July. Last week, the bank’s Monetary Policy Committee made another cut, dropping the repo rate to 12 percent. Erdoğan...

As we reported two weeks ago, economic growth in India has fallen by half this year, from 8.1 percent in the first quarter of the year to 4.5 percent in the third, as more borrowers and lenders default and the credit crisis deepens. The nation’s 2019 GDP will be the lowest in five years. The...

This past October, President Trump announced he was pulling American troops out of Syria, which, in fact, have been illegally in Syria since 2014.  He said, “I campaigned on bringing our soldiers back home, and that’s what I’m doing.” In an about-face, last Wednesday, the U.S. Secretary of Defense and a leading general told members...

Last Monday, with strong bipartisan support, both the U.S. Senate and House Armed Services Committees voted to sanction any company helping to complete Nord Stream 2, Russia’s gas pipeline to Germany. Since the nearly constructed pipeline runs under the Baltic Sea, it bypasses Ukraine completely, thus costing it billions of dollars in lost transit fees...

Last week, the House of Representatives, in addition to voting to impeach President Trump, agreed to the largest military budget in history: $738 billion. The vote wasn’t even close: 377 voted for it, only 48 were against it. Democrats and Republicans finally found an issue they could agree on. The new spending bill eliminated virtually...

The crippling transport strike that began 13 days ago over pension reforms in France continues. And yesterday, one of the key government figures pushing pension reforms, Jean-Paul Delevoye, dubbed “Mr. Pensions,” resigned after reports surfaced of a transparency scandal. Last Wednesday, Prime Minister Édouard Philippe claimed the government’s new system would be fairer and more...