Deals involving Europe’s private equity firms transferring assets among themselves have fallen by more than 50 percent to €16.8 billion, year on year, as rising interest rates and a gloomy economic outlook have dimmed what the Financial Times called “buyout game of pass-the-parcel.”
Shut out of key parts of the world’s currency interchange by Western sanctions, Russia began accepting India’s rupees directly as payment for oil and other exports.
Chinese consumers spent lavishly through the Labor Day holidays during the first week of this month, a traditional barometer of the consumer economy’s future strength.
Europe’s benchmark price of natural gas sank to €35.20 per megawatt-hour on 5 May, its lowest since July 2021 when Russia first began cutting back its gas exports to the continent.
In this year’s first quarter, demand for diesel fuel and other petroleum distillates was about 6 percent lower than a year earlier, the Financial Times reported.
The European Central Bank (ECB) raised its base interest rate a quarter point on 4 May after making six consecutive half-point increases since embarking on its current campaign of tightening in July last year.
Last September when gold prices were sinking, The Trends Journal forecast that prices had bottomed. As we go to press, spot gold is selling at $2035 per ounce.
China’s manufacturing economy slumped in April, with the purchasing managers index (PMI) for the sector slipping from 51.9 in March to 49.2 last month.
China’s yuan, not the dollar, was the most-used currency in China’s international trade at the end of March, Business Insider reported.
In April, South Korea's exports declined 14.2 percent, year on year, for the seventh consecutive month, their longest slide since the beginning of the COVID War, Reuters reported.